Fieldnotes from Svalbard, Norway. February 2026
“Don’t move! Let’s all be quiet for a moment,” said Knut, our field technician. Everyone sat down, trying to find a somewhat comfortable position in our snowmobile suits somewhere between the towering sea ice ridges surrounding us. We – a group of glaciology students from the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS) – were sitting in front of Paulabreen’s massive calving front, where the glacier connects to the sea and large chunks of ice fall into the ocean. It is late February and the peak of winter in Svalbard. The sun is still hiding behind the pyramidic mountain tips of Rindersbukta, an arm of the larger Van Mijenfjorden, at the southern tip of Spitsbergen. At this time of the year, the fjord is usually covered under a thick blanket of sea ice all the way to its mouth. Although, this year’s sea ice extent is particularly low and we can see open water far on the horizon, which seems uncomfortably close. Longyearbyen, our temporary home for the recent months, is an almost 100-km snowmobile drive away from here, but we decided this journey is worth it. Where else on Earth can one still witness an actively advancing glacier, when global warming is driving glacier decline worldwide?
But don’t get me wrong, Paulabreen is not an exception – however it does something weird. A behaviour we call “surging” in the field of glaciology. This is when a glacier abruptly starts accelerating within weeks or months to 10–1000 times its pre-surge velocities. As for Paulabreen, this triggered an advance of the glacier of several kilometres into the fjord at a rate of 4 to 5 metres per day. An incredible sight. In its fight with the sea ice, the area around the glacier front feels almost like a battlefield. High seracs towering in front of us at different angles, broken-up sea ice rifts all over the place, while huge boulders and moraine material line the lateral edges of the fjord.
A soft rustle disturbs the quiet, as someone in the crowd tries to adjust what seemed like a rather uncomfortable position. “Hmm,” Andy, our professor, sighed impatiently, “it seems like there is not much going on today, but during wintertime there is anyway less activity.” Suddenly everyone springs to life and shakes off their paralysis. In our impatience, we start walking around, playing in the snow and even building a small human pyramid, the usual UNIS student behaviour in the field to stay warm and cozy. Knut adjusts his rifle on his shoulder and looks around, feeling a bit uneasy. Svalbard is polar bear territory, and we are right in the middle of their hunting grounds, the sea ice. Several black dots can be seen on the surrounding sea ice – seals, or “polar bear lunch,” as Andy described them earlier when we passed them on our snowmobiles.
We are on the final excursion of our course. After more than a month of polar night, emerging from the darkness, the daylight is coming back at a rapid pace, enabling us to finally explore Svalbard’s vast Arctic landscapes. The last few weeks have been intense. We were out on snow scooters at least once per week, using radar to measure glacier ice thickness, drilling firn cores to study the snow accumulation, and collecting water samples in proglacial icings to investigate glacier–groundwater interactions. We crawled our way through an englacial channel, crossed the sea ice, explored the inside of an ice cave and so much more. Every single excursion was carefully planned and executed with a logistics and safety briefing, studying the weather forecast and the terrain ahead of us. Despite temperatures dropping as low as −30°C, stormy weather, and up to 12-hour-long field trips, I must admit that there wasn’t a single moment where I personally felt uncomfortable. This is not least owed to the special personal bonds you create. Although we only met each other recently, my classmates felt as familiar as good old friends – a typical Svalbard phenomenon which, in my case, has resulted in some deep friendships, already since my previous stay in 2018.
Despite all these adventures, this field trip felt somewhat special. It is the farthest we have been gone from our little island of civilisation in Longyearbyen. And although for some people feeling that far from safety can feel quite uncomfortable and even confining, to me the vast, treeless Arctic tundra landscapes of Svalbard, with its ice caps, gigantic fjord systems, and open space stretching to the horizon, provides a sense of freedom that you hardly get anywhere else on the planet.
“All right, time to pack up and head home. There is a long way ahead of us and we want to get back before it gets dark,” Knut calls out to us. We gather and start slowly walking our way back to the snowmobiles parked around 100 metres away. As we trudge through the snow, a thunderous cracking sound suddenly breaks the air. Everyone turns around in the blink of an eye, facing the calving front. We can see the tip of a large serac collapsing and shattering on the sea ice. Just as if the glacier wanted to wave goodbye with a final anthem.
Janosh Beer is a PhD student at the Laboratory of Hydraulics, Hydrology and Glaciology (VAW) at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. His participation in the UNIS Glaciology course was supported by Swiss Polar Institute’s Field and Summer Schools funding instrument.