This spring is a pretty busy period in our project, as we have several field campaigns going on on different places at the same time. First out were Stig Falk-Petersen and Anette Wold in Canada, then Eva Leu, Angela Wulff and Wojtek Moskal started with experiments in Ny-Ålesund two weeks ago, and Janne Søreide, Henrik Nygård, Jozef Wiktor, Agata Weydmann and Mikko Vihtakari went to Rijpfjorden last week. Judging from the webcam, the working conditions are good there as well.

In Ny-Ålesund we had some problems with the weather during the first week, since it was quite windy which resulted in effective temperatures often around -30. But the preparation for our experimental acitivies also took quite some time, so we never got bored.  The aim of our stay here is to carry out in situ experiments with different algal cultures isolated from Rijpfjorden to assess the effect of light and UV radiation on their food quality (measured in terms of fatty acid composition and elemental stoichiometry). For these exposure studies, we use underwater frames that were built especially for our campaign (thank you so much, Christian!!), and that have been working really fine so far. Usually, we place the algae outside late in the evening, to start the experiment with comparatively low light conditions, and retrieve after appx. 40 hours. We measure at the same time in situ radiation underwater with loggers mounted on the frames. In addition, we take spectral underwater profiles with a radiometer several times. You can find some pictures of our acitivities so far under 'Field work 2008' on the left side of the page.