Thursday, 9 August 2012


Approaching the island Muostakh, Photo: Thomas Opel, Alfred Wegener InstituteOur colleagues have been on Samoilov already since early July and our group of six, two German scientists from AWI and four Russian scientists, left for our expedition one month later - at the beginning of August. Our destination: the island Muostakh in Tiksi Bay.

After our almost one week stay in the small town Tiksi due to bad weather conditions (and hence poor flying conditions) as well as tight flight schedules, we finally arrived on Tuesday on "our" island. We used the time in Tiksi to check our equipment and food supplies as well as visiting the local banja, the Russian sauna. That visit was particularly enjoyable, as we will have no shower available within the next two weeks. After approximately about twenty minutes of flight we landed near the place where we have set up our camp.


Camp, Photo: Thomas Opel, Alfred Wegener InstituteIn this camp we will live and work in the next two weeks. The work of our group focus here primarily on four main areas, all related to the essential features of the island regarding permafrost:

More on that in later blog entries.

The first two working days, we have essentially used to get an overview of the northern part of about five kilometers long and up to 400 meters wide island that will be our main area of work. We have already seen a lot of interesting structures, documented and have started to develop working hypotheses that we want to check with the subsequent work.

As I already took part last year on an expedition lasting nearly two weeks on the island Muostakh, I have the opportunity to compare my impressions and observations from this years trip with those of last year. For me personally it's very exciting to see how dramatically the shape of the island, especially the shape of the coastline, has been changed within a year.

Currently we have very good weather with temperatures reaching 20 degrees Celsius in the sunshine and light winds. The latter is particularly important because it keeps us largely from the mosquitoes that are invariably present in such weather conditions.

After work, we take a bath in the Laptev Sea, which today is very warm with 14 degrees Celsius. So for a while, we can at least shortly forget that we are here in the Arctic.


Best wishes

Thomas Opel


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Main page of the English translation of the blog "Tundra Stories": http://page21.org/blogs/59-samoylov
Original blog in German: http://www.awi.de/de/go/Tundra-Stories