After almost a 2-year hiatus from active research activities, our field campaigns are back on! This blog series will take you to the Canadian Arctic and onboard the CCGS Amundsen.

The 11^th of February 2020, I arrived in Qaanaaq, the northernmost town in Greenland with 632 inhabitants. It was a few days before the sun returned on the sky after three months of Polar nights..

Members of PeCaBeau (Permafrost Carbon on the Beaufort Shelf) travelled to Québec City in Canada to take part in a two-day planning workshop held by Amundsen Science.

At the end of the 4^th Takuvik expedition to the Mackenzie Delta, Bennet Juhls (AWI) and I were asked by the Peel River team to repeat water sampling from the creeks along the Dempster Highway between Inuvik and Dawson City. Without much hesitation we agreed to do the job – who would say no to the opportunity to drive this legendary route...

One of the fundamental goals of conducting science is to be able to communicate it to others. As scientists, we are not always effective communicators, especially when addressing non-peers. The challenge is sometimes even greater when it comes to capturing children’s attention with subject matters that, at first glance, seem very complex...

Everything is packed. The truck is fully loaded with our equipment meant for complete autonomy during several days. Bennet and I are gearing up as the temperatures are dropping close to 0^oC in the Delta.

Welcome to Tuk, the “Land of the pingos”!

The team of the University of Lisbon (Gonçalo Vieira, Pedro Pina, Pedro Freitas and Daniel Pinheiro) and Natural Resources Canada (Dustin Whalen, Angus Robertson and Paul Fraser) has been in the field in June – August 2019 to conduct surveys of coastal...

Open, Pack, Close. Open, Pack, Close. The more than 100-year old warehouse on Herschel Island is crowded, possibly as it was way back in time when the Hudson’s Bay Company had their goods for storage and sale in this large wooden structure with a tin roof. Everyone is busy...

The fieldwork of WP 1 at Komakuk Beach (Ivvavik National Park, Yukon Territory, CA) has been successful. We collected more than 400 soil samples, vegetation, root and water samples.

After our (myself Natalia Doloisio and Jean Paul Vanderlinden) scoping fieldwork to Yakutsk in June, Magali Vullierme, Mateo Cordier and I from the CEARC Laboratory (France), came back to the Sakha Republic (Russia) to continue our research. This time, we spent our first five days in the capital city, Yakutsk, working with...

On Highway 10 from Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk, Guislain, Édouard and Joannie drive on the newly opened road built on the permafrost. The ride is beautiful, spanning a vegetation gradient from the boreal forest to the arctic tundra. Closer to Tuktoyaktuk, we enter the Pingo National Landmark area, where 8 mounds...

I am a microbiologist studying the degradation of terrestrial dissolved organic matter (tDOM) by microorganisms in marine and freshwater aquatic environments. I am doing my PhD in a small town in southern France located in the foothills of the Pyrenees on one side and the...

A short break in Quebec City for scientists before flying again to Inuvik, this time with an almost entirely new crew. For expedition #3, we shifted from helicopter surveys to small vessel surveys (21ft long boats). We targeted the sampling of the MacKenzie Delta plume right after the...

Well, this title is a bit of a short cut to describe the satellite activities that are taking place in the Work Package 4 (WP4) of the Nunataryuk project, but it summarises it all. Our aim is to characterise suspended and dissolved material exported from the Mackenzie River into the Delta and coastal Beaufort Sea...

The Zodiac approaches the beach in the morning hours. It is heavily loaded: six scientists, including gear and equipment, are sitting on the inflated edges of the boat, while Cedric stands starboard at the wheel. As soon as the engines turn off, all passengers start moving like ants... 

Our fourth week started out with two days of hard slogging, carrying boats and sampling and camping gear five km around Aberdeen Canyon. The trail was often a knee-deep muddy track between hummocks. Despite our packing as light as possible, it took us multiple trips to get everything portaged...

During our fifth week, we followed the Peel River on its way through great walls of loose sedimentary rock and out onto the Peel Plateau, where our river journey ended on August 2, 2019 at the Fort McPherson ferry crossing. Bill and Niek had driven the Klondike and Dempster highways from Whitehorse to re-sample all of our sites...

The third week began with a drive up from Whitehorse with new participants:  Bobbi Rose Koe of the Tetlit Gwich’in First Nation, Jody Overduin (Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society – Yukon Chapter) and Kirsi Keskitalo (VU Amsterdam). We reached the Ogilvie River and met up with the canoe crew, who had hiked...

The terrestrial Permafrost team has arrived in Inuvik on Tuesday the 29^th of July. Preparations for the Komakuk Summer Expedition 2019 are progressing fast. Tents, camping equipment, soil and water sampling equipment and other scientific gear is being checked and inventoried...