The 3D lab

Scilogs

Posted on July 16, 2015 by lembrechtsjonas

Hooray, I will blog some field stories from Sweden in Dutch on the Scilogs-blog again: http:// www.scilogs.be/ontopoftheworld/boven-de-poolcirkel/

Posted in General | 2 Comments

Norway rocks!

Posted on July 14, 2015 by lembrechtsjonas

Norway is never just Norway.

Lonely rock, balancing on the top

We had to revisit the magnificent views of the north in order to find back temperature sensors that we had left scattered through the mountains. It made for three days of walking, camping and working in one of the most breathtaking landscapes I have ever seen.

Birch tree surviving on a smooth steep slope

I was in particular impressed by the wide variety of rock formations that defined the landscape. Rocks are truly reigning in the north – at least in the summer season – and the vegetation has to adapt to their moods.

Meltwater river forcing us to jump

We also had to subject to their power and clamber up and down the slopes to find back our sensors. It made for exciting adventures and some tricky balancing excercices, but it was definitely worth every second of the experience.

Impressive rock formation in the cloud

Nothing tops making soup on a campfire with such a magnificent view, to have a short but well-deserved brake in between the different plots.

Campfire in a river bed

Posted in Norway | Tagged arctic, camping, Ecology, Hike, Hiking, Landscapes, Mountains, Nature, Nature photography, north, Norway, PhD, Rocks, Scandinavia, Stones, Wild, Wildlife | 8 Comments

Success

Posted on July 13, 2015 by lembrechtsjonas

I am on my way back to Belgium after a very intense but successful field campaign in the high north.

Long-tailed skua on the look-out

We managed to do everything we planned: setting up a new experiment around Abisko, revisiting last year’s experiment and collecting over a hundred loggers with a year of soil temperature data from Sweden and Norway, resulting in the build-up of the best dataset I could ever imagine.

“What are you looking at”

It is always a pity to leave the midnight sun behind, but it sweetens the goodbye to know that everything went as planned. And there is one fellow who is not at all sad to see me go: this very angry skua with its nest close to our plots.

It had been attacking us with all its power to get us out of here and leave it alone, so who am I to resist?

Attacking low

More pictures and stories will follow soon, as soon as I start recovering from the trip!

Getting low in fear of an attack

Posted in General | Tagged Abisko, Birds, Ecology, Field ecology, Fieldwork, Hiking, measuring, Mountains, Nature, Nature photography, Photography, Scandinavia, Science, Skua, Summer, Travel, Travelling | 2 Comments

Working in cloud nine

Posted on July 6, 2015 by lembrechtsjonas

The top of mount Nuolja, overlooking the beautiful Abisko valley. At the other side, the Lapporten mountain formation holds back some dangerous looking clouds. They seem to rest heavily on the mountain tops, but stayed on a safe distance from our location, where we hiked through the snow towards our plots.

Still a lot of snow on the mountains, but it is melting fast

As our fieldwork day went on – very succesfull, if you were wondering- some clouds escaped their virtual meteorological cage at the other side and hurried through the valley, lying low in the air.

Little experimental plot and incoming clouds at 900 meter elevation

In a few minutes, we were completely overwhelmed by the clouds and we lost our amazing view to a dull but extraordinary grey.

It made for wonderful landscapes that seemed to belong in a futuristic movie, with endless snowpatches were all colour had been sucked out, and cliffs that dropped into nothing. The end of the world seemed near.

Out of this world

Luckily, it was a fast moving cloud, and it disappeared again without causing any damage. After its silent passage, it revealed again the sleeping clouds on Lapportens’ head.

Clouds sleeping on Lapporten, the famous mountain formation in Abisko

Trollius or ‘Smörbolla’, freely translated into ‘ball of butter’

Posted in Sweden | Tagged Abisko, Adventure, Climate, Ecology, Fieldwork, Hiking, Lapland, Mountain ecology, Mountains, Nature, Nature photography, Photography, Scandinavia, Snow, Sweden, Weather | 3 Comments

Endless days

Posted on July 4, 2015 by lembrechtsjonas

We are back in Abisko again, the beautiful tiny little village in Northern Sweden, above the polar circle, where we will follow-up on our exciting experiments.

Rhodiola rosea or golden root in early spring

Right before our arrival we arrived, skies started to clear after a period of rain, making way for a nice 13 °C weather that is a big relief after the crazy heat wave that tortures Belgium.

Today, we started slowly by hiking up on one of our steepest mountains to put out some probes. This limited the fieldwork and left some time to finish all important preparations for the next days. Limited fieldwork, but no limits to the beautiful and amazing things we could witness in the mountains.

The lonely white flower of the tasty cloudberry

The northern spring brought us some beautiful plants, and the rains of the last few days made their leaves shiny and green, with delicate colourfull flowers to brighten up the views.

Dryas octopetala or mountain avens

The wildlife was present as well, with a ‘scary’ angry lemming as highlight of our (and probably his) day.

The higher we got in the mountains, the more persistent snowpatches we found. Some of them melted only recently, with the vegetation being in a very early state of spring.

Willow catkin right after snowmelt

Fieldwork went smooth, besides an unfortunate persistent patch of snow right on top of our plots at highest elevations. We waded through the melting water in an effort to get them free, but twenty centimeters of ice cold water on top of a frozen soil made it impossible to put out probes.

Snow on the plots, but very wet and slushy snow

That was one little piece of bad luck, but it is countered by the smooth progress we made in all other parts of the fieldwork, making me very optimistic about the next days of this trip.