We’ve been at Tarfala Research Station for a week now, and making great progress with our sampling schedule! Unfortunately, the weather has well and truly called a halt to fieldwork due to rain/snow/hail/gale force winds, but we’re making the most of it by staying warm and dry and catching up with processing our ice surface sediment samples in the lab (and discovering just how smelly cryoconite is while drying in the oven!).

Cryoconite sampling on Isfallsglaciären

In addition to completing our sampling of the moraines and proglacial stream outlets, we also had a go at taking a sediment core from the bottom of one of Isfallsglaciären’s proglacial lakes. To do this we carried a dinghy from Tarfalasjön to Isfallssjön across multiple moraines, which turned out to be a seriously physical task! Coring proved to be much trickier than expected as the proglacial sediments are very fine and dense and the corer struggled to penetrate the sediments at the lake bottom. Although this was a disappointment, and we ended up having lunch in a bothy bag to shelter from the bad weather, taking the boat out on Isfallssjön was a a really fun experience… We’ll try again when the weather improves!

Boating in Isfalls proglacial lake

We’re really glad that we decided to front-load our fieldwork schedule and have collected most of what we need, as the weather is really putting a spanner in the works at the moment. Good company and nightly saunas are going a long way to keeping spirits high! To end on a VERY positive note, following some cricket coaching from Nick and I (the only Brits at the station), Team Tarfala went on to win back the “Ashes” from Kebnekaise Mountain Station at the annual cricket match! HOWZAT?!!!

Evening cricket practise… Tarfala style!

This blog post was first published at https://arcticresearch.wordpress.com/ on 14th August 2017 as part of our INTERACT project, “GRASP” (glacier recession as a source of environmental pollutants).