It is currently a beautiful time in the Arctic. The sky is bursting with pastel colours as it transitions from the polar night to the midnight sun. Each day the sun rays light up the surrounding mountains a little more as the sun hangs above the horizon for a little longer. However unfortunately, due to my lack of Norwegian (absolutely nothing) I have swapped internships. I had to leave the Longyearbyen local government and have now started a new internship at bioCEED. I’m a little disappointed that I will not be able to continue to work on improving reuse in […]
Monthly archives: March 2020
Two months have past, and I am almost half way through the semester. So far I have only touched on some of the tasks that a lab technician conducts. I have spent several hours calibrating pipets, cleaning labs, setting up new instruments and transferring some samples from one container to another. I am quite familiar at the lab already, and that feels good. I am happy to have started the work, but feel I am lagging a bit behind schedule, since I want to be done with my workload by May 15th when the class ends. My lecture schedule and […]
The past few weeks have been spent gaining a thorough understanding of waste water management systems, Adventfjorden as a recipient, and possible solutions to the challenges of waste water pollution. This post will explain the conditions in Adventfjorden and summarize the conclusions from earlier seabed studies. Adventfjorden is a 7 km long and 3–5 km wide fjord on the southern side of Isfjorden, Svalbard’s largest fjord system. The two largest rivers, Adventelva and Longyearelva, plus numerous of other streams contribute a substantial amount of melt water from the surrounding glaciers and as well as a large amount of inorganic sediments […]
Daily operations The last weeks I ́ve been part of the daily operations at Polar Permaculture. That includes sowing microgreens and basil, tending the plants, some deliveries and other types of miscellaneous work. A few weeks ago I started setting up a new grow room, where I had to remove a small biogas system that no longer was being used and I had to insulate parts of the room. Íll be using the room for test growing different types of plants. At the moment we ́re waiting for a delivery of parts needed to make the grow room fully operational, […]