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Can plants protect permafrost |
5 August 2024 |
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It’s Monday August 5th and a dense fog surrounds Ny-Alesund. The morning plane isn’t leaving and there is no opportunity for safe fieldwork, but we’re still optimistic that the fog will clear later. Lore will fly back to Longyearbyen today, with a batch of samples taken by Rúna and Lore for the INSULATE project. Rúna will stay for three more days to work on a project of her own (more about this later). | |
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Mellageret (the bar) looks grey and dull from the station window. Last Saturday it was still the local epicentre of silly dances and (mostly harmless) bicycle incidents. The INSULATE project runs at the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS) and is a collaboration with WUR (where Rúna and Lore work and study) and several Scandinavian universities. Two PhDs, Lore and another MSc student work on the project, which runs in parallel at UNIS and in Ny-Alesund. Rúna coordinates and helps. The aim of the project is to monitor how different plant- and soil communities on Svalbard affects the exchange of heat between the atmosphere and the permafrost. 
To see how this interaction between plants, soils and permafrost temperatures works, we lay out small fields at xisting permafrost monitoring sites (boreholes), in which we characterize plant communities, soil biotic communities and permafrost temperature timeseries. Each site has three little fields, V for maximum cover of vascular plants, B for maximum cover of bryophytes (mosses) and M for a mixed plot. Rúna and Lore have laid out new fields in Ny-Alesund, next to those already installed in Longyearbyen. Apart from that, fieldwork consisted of digging in deep (90cm) soil temperature and moisture sensors (it took a drill and a lot of courage), permafrost measurements, plant species recording and soil sampling. In the coming years, the soil temperature and moisture data will be downloaded regularly, and some key measurements will be repeated. This way we hope to be able to tell which plant- and soil properties contribute to keeping the permafrost cool. 
Rúna and Lore taking a soil sample in Longyeardalen with the corer, measuring organic layr thickness and diviging the sample into 5cm segments. 
It’s nearly impossible to dig anything into a rocky and partially frozen soil, which is why we predrill the holes. In the evening, there was still thick fog. No flights, no fieldwork. It looks like Lore gets to enjoy the Dutch Arctic Station for one more day, and that Rúna is going to have to work a little harder in the coming days in order to have some material for her next blog ;)  
Luckily the weather was great pretty much all other days, with magnificent views of the fjord and cheerful sunglasses. | |
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