AMP'D Blog: Tatiana Vishnivetskaya

Tatiana and Karen in Longyearbyen.

Greetings Dear Reader!

You probably have read blogs from my AMP’D teammates, colleagues, friends about our overall successful field work in Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard. Our team overcame all hurdles and obstacles that nature and fate have prepared for us during travel and field work. And I dare to assure you that you will hear more about interesting research coming out of this project. 

Talking with different people I got a lot of questions about what it was like to travel during a worldwide pandemic. Here are my impressions from an international travel in time of Covid-19. Briefly, we have traveled about 12,555 km (7,800 miles), got seven negative Covid-19 test results, stayed in quarantine hotel for 10 days, took six planes and roundtrip 14-hours boat ride, experienced extreme weather with temperature as low as -27°C (-16°F), strong wind about 35 km/h (22 m/h), zero visibility due to wind-driven snow, and rough landing at crosswind in Atlanta. We even tested gender-oriented coats designed for polar regions by Russian company BASK.

Our travel on March 1st from Atlanta, USA to Oslo, Norway through Amsterdam, Netherlands was satisfying – there were just a few travelers. However, the first impression was deceiving. At every step we encountered unexpected situations. There was everything from sudden travel cancelations due to new Covid-19 regulations, to risk of departure due to wrong accusation of having positive Covid-19 test, to hotel evacuation due to avalanche danger. I could not even count how many times we changed airfare or hotel reservations. 

Our stay in the quarantine hotel Thon at the Oslo Airport was not bad. We were able to leave the hotel and go outside for a nice walk on snowy paths through woods or visit a beautiful Keplerstjerna or Kepler star, a 45-meter-high monument, to have distanced and masked outdoor AMP’D group daily meetings. Some of us even hiked to a few historical landscapes, e.g., Trandumskogen War Memorial; Gardermoen Raceway; or King Rakni’s mound, the largest grave mound in the Scandinavia; or Huag, the oldest farm in the area. 

On March 12th we were released from the quarantine hotel and after two Covid-19 tests we boarded a plane to the island of Spitsbergen in Svalbard archipelago, which is located between mainland Norway and the North Pole

​We took advantage of being in Longyearbyen and visited the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a long-term storage facility where the world’s largest collection of crop diversity is preserved for future generations. Finally, on March 16th after 14 hours boat ride, we reached Ny-Ålesund, a small town at 79°N. Against all odds our field work was successful. 

The team cored active layer and permafrost from a few locations around Ny-Ålesund. Samples from five shallow and 3 deeper boreholes with the total length of about 10 meters were collected and transported to the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Our travel back home was shorter, just four days. Even it took a whole month of March to get field work done, I have a feeling that time in Svalbard flew by incredibly fast. ​​​