Svalbard, University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS) - 78°13`N 15° 38`E

31st of march 2008. 27 students from Austria, Belgium, Canada, England, Germany, Norway, Poland, Russia, Slowakia, Switzerland and the USA met at UNIS to participate at the 5-weeks lasting Msc-Course AG 330 “Permafrost and Periglacial Environments”. We all came with different backgrounds, Master-, Diploma or Phd-students but together we wanted to experience periglacial landscapes, learn about permafrost related scientific problems and discuss all the up-to-date research questions... hands-on-experience in the Arctic!
So let`s go: 30 hours of excellent lectures, 20 hours of seminars, 828 pages literature to read (urgh!!), an essay to write and presentations to give, discussions and of course a lot of field activities and a 3 hours lasting exam filled a tight schedule. Every week, the course went out to field excursion to the surrounding area of Longyearbyen. By feet, belt wagon and – yippie- snowscooter and under weather conditions varying from bright sun and blue sky to once almost white-out ... NICE!
Within the course we got a broad knowledge and than could see all typical landscape features with our own eyes, rock glaciers, cracked ice-wedge polygons, pingos, icings (that emerged as the perfect playground for permafrost students) and so much more (like monster cornices that wait to visit Nybyen as avalanches, the part of Longyearbyen where all students from UNIS live). The field activities with my fellow students and lecturers helped me a lot to develope my diploma thesis topic about ice-wedges. We quickly became a very good team, I found great friends and beside our work we still found enough time for discussions and some spare time (e.g. for activities like digging into frozen ground…). It was a great experience to meet people from all over the world with the same kind of fever. I didnt really know what to expect before I started the course ... but over all I am so glad that I was a part of it. At least for me, I got many more questions about all that, there is so much more to do! We will come back, promised! If YOU are a young permafrost researcher who wants to participate in active research in a stimulating academic environment, I can only recommend you to come up here and join the course in 2009. (http://www.unis.no/10_STUDIES/1020_Courses/Arctic_Geology/ag_330.htm)

Thanks for a great time to our lecturers Hanne Christiansen, Ole Humlum and Hårvard Juliussen from UNIS and to our guest lecturers Toni Lewkowicz, Collin Ballantyne and Hans-Wolfgang Hubberten and of course to all my fellow AG 330 2008 students!

Steffi
P.S. Good Bye Svalbard! See you 2009?