Easter - part III

It's the middle of the night, the sun is shining just outside my window here in Longyearbyen on Svalbard, and apparently theres a solar eclipse going on at this very moment, but only 9 percent or so is being eclipsed so I can't really be bothered to stick my head out the window to have a look.

So, easter, part III. Well, hum, so, we stopped by Paulabreen (Paula glacier) on our way to the east coast, or rather, we stopped on the sea ice in front of the glacier.

Paulabreen is a surge-type glacier, that is a glacier that every now and then decides to move forward really fast, and then quiet down again. Wikipedia can tell you more.
Anyway, Paulabreen surged 600-700 years ago, ending up with its glacier front 25 km further out than today. But, Skobreen (Sko glacier), which terminates into the side of Paulabreen, surged in, ehm, 2005, or around there, pushing on Paulabreen, making the front of Paulabreen move forward up to 10 metres a day for over a year. This whole business makes the glacier become massively crevassed and nasty and beautiful, none of which you can see from the pictures below. But it is nice and eerily blue.

Amanda demonstrating how to perform glacier/sea ice yoga in a scooter suit and -helmet, and still looking good!

Ice, ice, baby. Mind you, I haven't tweeked the colours in these upcoming icepics (haha! did you get it?) at all. The ice was actually this amazingly blue.

Oh! And all around on the sea ice you could see little black spots appearing and disappearing and reappearing. These were ringed seals, coming up for breath and trying not to be eaten by polar bears. Well, I didn't bring much of a zoom lens, so the pics below are already heavily cropped, but at least you can see it's a seal-like animal.

Intermezzo

As I am the undefeated queen of procrastination, here's a bit of randomness while I spend some more time doing things other than revising for exams. And it's not like my procrastinations are useless anyway. I have cleaned my boots, hoovered, made three litres of vegetable soup and played three rounds of Carcasonne. A perfectly ok Saturday. Outside it's snowing, has been all day.

In my head, everything can be fixed by a cup of tea. Seriously, everything.

from Little Doodles by Kate Wilson

 I was web-window shopping here the other day and came across this little set of sportstop and -shorts at H&M and my goodness how I want it! I never wear short shorts, but I still want it. But, 2012 is a partial shop-stop year, so no gold underwear today.

Easter - part II

It's Norway's national day today, I've walked in the parade, I've eaten cake and hot dogs and I've slept for four hours this afternoon. At this moment don't really know where to put myself, but I found some wine in the kitchen, and I'm just going to end up in front of my laptop ayway, so let's blog.

Easter part II, right. The following pics are from the beginning of easter when me and three others snow scootered to a UNIS student cabin close to Svea, one of the two Norwegian coal mines on Svalbard.

I can never decide whether the story of a picture should be under or over it. Any opinions?

Let's put text above for now.
So, this is Niklas,hacking up coal into smaller pieces that we could actually get to light up.

The cabin. No water, no electricity. Going for a piss in the night was interesting. Rifle over shoulder, long jons and down jacket, carefully looking around for polar bears when peeing.

Oh, and that mountain in the middle on the pic below, called Aspelintoppen, that's where we skied the next day. Didn't get all the way to the top though. It's about 1200 m high, we wen't up to about 900 m or so.

 Old, windblown polar bear tracks on the side of the mountain. From a mum and cub.

As far up as we went this. Mind you the last bit took forever! And my stamina is non-existant compared to everyone else on this arcipelago. I was so tired as we were to go down again, and the snow was hard packed, I lost my grip and ended up sliding sideways/backwards/forwards down half the mountain before I finally managed to stop. Felt like scary stuff at the time of sliding. Though got away with only some scratches on my skis. I need to learn how to ski better. I'm getting there mind you.

Anyway, back down on the sea ice we found this! That wasn't there when we went up. Fresh blood, like three metres of smudged blood.

And tracks! Polar bear tracks! No bear though. Anyway, it would have been a non-hungry bear which, naturally, makes them slightly less dangerous than hungry bears. Or so I would guess.

 Drove a bit further, and what did we find?

 Half chewed baby seal!

Lastly, scooters, skies, (relativelly) flat sea ice = Katja on skies behind scooter. Think she got up to 50 or 60 km/h. I'm sitting behind Amanda on the other scooter with the camera going click click click click click click having no idea of what I'm actually aiming at.