I left Ny Alesund having seen most of the mesocosms deployed and everything running well.
The local Arctic fox – who apparently lives under the 1912 houses which have become the Dutch Arctic station – appeared to see me off.

I found Longyearbjen in a state of great excitement because a polar bear had drifted in on the sea ice a few days ago. I was hoping he’d come back, but so far he hasn’t. It was a big attraction, because although they are said to be all around, understandably they don’t come into town that often. The authorities were happy as long as he snoozed on his iceberg, but when he started to move around, they zapped him with a tranquillizer dart and moved him off to a “safer” location.That left the ice floes clear for the Eiders.

Longyearbjen is called after American John M. Longyear, who established the first mine here in 1906. The mining history of the settlement is in evidence everywhere, old coal shafts and the pylons which carried the rope line used to transport the coal to the port.

Coal is still mined here today. It’s controversial, Greenpeace staged a protest here last year, which has made them quite unpopular with the locals, worried about their jobs. That’s presumably one reason why up in Ny Alesund, somebody threw a seal’s head onto the deck of the Esperanza. The local newsletter ‘icepeople’, self-styled as “the world’s northernmost alternative newspaper” reported on the return of the environmentalists saying “This time Greenpeace is promising – it seems – to be good”, i.e. because they are supporting scientific research rather than protesting. The newsletter people are clearly still wary, though.
There is a test project running here for carbon capture and storage. I went to the site of the borehole with the director, Gunnar Sand.

They are testing whether the underground storage site would be safe to store 90% of emissions from the local coal-fired power plant. He says they could be up and running by 2015. But he also stresses the need for much more intensive testing, as safety is paramount. He says Longyearbjen is ideal for a pilot plant, as they have a small community with a closed system. He thinks the world will be dependent on coal for the next fifty years at least, given especially the developments in China. More later on DW radio and the website.

There’s supposed to be a population of 2000 here. I don’t know where they all are, it makes a rather empty impression most of the time. Most people I’ve met have been incomers, who tend to come for a short time, fall in love with it and stay as long as they can. Margrete Nilsdater Skaktavl Keyser is one.

Margrete came here for a short course and went on to do a full degree here. The student residences at the far end of the town show the two main attractions that seem to bring students to the uni here : snow mobiles in winter and nature all around, all year round, with plenty of potential for field work on all aspects of Arctic sciences:

Margrete came here as a student for a short course and stayed on for a longer degree, writing on polar bears. You need a job to stay here, so she takes whatever she finds and goes home to the Norwegian mainland in between.In the season, she guides people on snowmobile trips. At the moment she’s working with the Svalbard authorities compiling a data base on encounters between humans and polar bears, trying to work out guidelines for avoiding “incidents”. I’ve been keeping that in mind walking around here. You can’t leave the town area safely without a rifle, flares etc. People have been killed around here, although it’s a good few years ago.
Glaciology Professor Doug Benn, a fellow Scot who taught in my old university St. Andrews, invited me to join him and two junior colleagues for a look at the local glaciers yesterday. He’s also an active researcher into a glacial area of the Himalayas. More on that next time.
As you can see, no hikes outside town without the rifle. Doug is the one in charge of the party’s safety here:

Yesterday evening and in the course of the day I had so many interesting talks it’s hard to know where to start.
Heidi Sörensen is Norway’s deputy environment minister and she seems to be really passionate about her job and the urgency of tackling climate change.This is just based on my encounter today.
Being a politican must sometimes be frustrating when things can’t move as fast as you would like them to – and you feel the future of the world is at stake.
In view of the extent to which the Arctic is already melting, she argues for rapid adaptation as well as mitigation. There was a lot of discussion about her government’s insistence on carbon capture and storage as the way to make sure Norway can keep on using and selling its oil and gas while reducing emissions, given that this is in the experimental stage. Quite a few experts here expressed doubts. She is confident that the technology will work – and reasonably fast, although she accepts that there could still be problems. Of course this would allow Norway to exploit the rest of the oil and gas thought to be there in the Arctic. But the Minister also actually said the Greenpeace moratorium idea was worth thinking about.Well, well.

Our venue today.
At the moment I’m listening to a Canadian speaker, who is presenting figures on the huge extent of Canada’s Arctic territory. As he says, it seems amazing Canada has no northern University and no Polar Institute. Good luck to those who are trying to change that.
He finds Tromsö amazing, with such an infrastructure so far north and a renowned university.
Meanwhile Siegfried from Germany has visited the blog and wonders if there will be insights here into what way the new Obama government will go in terms of climate protection.
Well, there is no quick answer to that here, but expectations are certainly very high that a new President Obama will be a positive influence and have the USA sign up to an effective post-Kyoto agreement, and to several other international conventions essential to protecting the Arctic, which the previous administration kept out of.
More later.