Having returned back to Svalbard January 8th ready for the spring semester at UNIS, often reported as being the best semester my hopes were held high for lots of high octane fun in the snow. I wasn’t the only one either judging by the number of skis and snowboards on the luggage carrousel upon arrival at Longyearbyen airport. However Mother Nature seems to have other ideas!
Up until two weeks ago there was adequate snow for ski lessons (given by very patient Norwegian friends) and for me to decide that it would be a great idea to purchase a snowmobile (more about that in future posts no doubt). Instead January temperatures have being over 10 degrees Celsius above average (taken since 1920) and in comparison to last year there has being up to 30 degrees C of separation. Rather bizarrely Longyearbyen was the warmest city by 4 degrees C in the whole of Norway last weekend!
With the abnormally high temperatures came extraordinarily high, record breaking rainfall. Within 24hrs over the last weekend in January 25.9 millimetres of rainfall was recorded at the airport, the usual rainfall for the entire month is only 15 millimetres!
Of course warm temperatures and high rainfall had many drawbacks, not least destroying the possibility of improving my skiing techniques (mainly standing up) and playing on my new snowmobile but it also triggered a number of avalanches in the area! Luckily nobody was caught up in any of them however the footbridge used daily by students on commute to UNIS was wiped out by a potentially fatal slab avalanche. On the up side we had free bus travel back and forth to UNIS from Nybyen for several days, on the down side however we now have an extended walk to UNIS now that our bridge has being destroyed.
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