Field day 2023: Arctic experience on fjord ice

On Friday 24 February we used our beautiful Arctic surroundings to organize a field day for our master and PhD students on fjord ice. Ramfjorden is less than on hour drive from Tromsø and it often has stable ice cover in January and February.

We were 5 instructors and 14 students and we did hands-on demonstrations of snow and sea ice measurements and sampling by snow pits and ice coring.

Ice coring on 30 to 40 cm of ice in Ramfjorden. (Photo: Karley Campbell)

Fresh snow was 10 to 25 cm deep and it had up to 3 distinct layers. Even though snow cover was less than a week old, strong temperature gradient already caused detectable metamorphosis in the bottom layer, while we observed fresh snowflakes in the top layer. (Photo: Polona Itkin)

Interdisciplinary work is fun! Here our instructor Karley supervising water sampling for chemical analysis. (Photo: Polona Itkin)

The field day group grateful for the perfect weather, snow and ice – and excited about Arctic expeditions and research! (Photo: Karley Campbell)

_{The field day was organized and funded by the Research Council of Norway project ‘Sea Ice Deformation and Snow for an Arctic in Transition’ (SIDRiFT) that is associated with CIRFA. We are very grateful to instructors from UiT Faculty of Physics and Technology (Johannes Lohse, Jack Landy, Janina Osanen and Polona Itkin) and UiT Faculty of Biosciences Fisheries and Economics (Karley Campbell). The coring equipment was kindly lent to us by the Nansen Legacy.}