News Archive

23 November 2020 Last week the new UNIS belt wagon finally arrived in Longyearbyen after being “corona-stuck” for eight months in Sweden. It is custom made for UNIS but is also a contribution to the local emergency preparedness infrastructure.

17 November 2020 UNIS has decided to run all the semester-long courses, running from January through May/April 2021. The shorter master's and PhD courses scheduled in spring are cancelled.

13 November 2020 The Arctic Safety Centre pilot course with 25 places was already fully booked within two days after it was announced. With 50 applicants for the course, it indicates that UNIS has a potential for this type of course in the future.

3 November 2020 Magdalena Wutkowska has investigated the roles of microbial eukaryotes in the High Arctic ecosystems. Wutkowska will defend her PhD digitally on 6 November 2020.

28 October 2020 Eli Anne Ersdal has studied how tides and weather affect how much energy is transported into the Arctic Ocean with the northernmost branch of the Gulf Stream. Ersdal will defend her PhD thesis on 2 November 2020.

23 October 2020 The snow sensor project, a collaboration between UNIS, the Arctic Safety Centre and Telenor Svalbard, has been so successful that Nordkapp municipality in mainland Norway has decided to test the system out in the town of Honningsvåg.

19 October 2020 Researchers at UNIS conduct fieldwork on Svalbard glaciers using drone technologies. The goal is to improve our understanding how climate change accelerates the melting of glaciers. Dr. Richard Hann explains how the drone fieldwork is conducted.

14 October 2020 Isfjorden on Svalbard contains less warm and salty Atlantic water than in recent years and is now more like an Arctic fjord. Observations from the UNIS cruise in September show that the "door is closed" for massive intrusion of Atlantic water since the water masses in Isfjorden and in the coastal current have become much fresher than on the shelf outside Isfjorden. A reduction in Atlantic zooplankton in Isfjorden further confirms this. The possibility for sea ice cover in the Isfjorden system this winter is thus good.

13 October 2020 This morning the new Centre of Excellence in Education, iEarth, was formally opened in a ceremony at UNIS.

5 October 2020 The Arctic Ocean has been frozen for a long time. It is difficult to say exactly how long. But the wildlife we find on the underside of the ice bears a clear testimony that the ice cover has lasted long enough for different species to have developed very special adaptations to be able to live in, on or just under the ice. Most spectacular are perhaps the amphipods we find inside the melting channels in the ice. These are facing an uncertain future as the ice in the Arctic melts. One might think that last year's summer, autumn and winter with a lot of ice around Svalbard gave these animals a little respite. Unfortunately, this is not the case.