At the beginning of spring Marco Potenza and Claudio Artoni went up to Ny-Alesund, 1231 km far from the North Pole, for the second expedition of the OPTICE project. During the days spent in the Italian base “Dirigibile Italia”, our researchers were able to perform some stratigraphic profiles of the snowpack and some sampling. Unfortunately, not everything went as planned! A few days before Claudio and Marco arrived, it rained in Svalbard and temperatures remained around +3°C. This is a bit of an anomaly since we were at the end of the Arctic winter. The rain had therefore melted a good part of the snowpack, leaving only large sheets of ice up to 40 cm thick.
All this ice made it difficult to move around and analyze the snow, so our researchers were only able to reach a few of the glaciers they planned. Our researchers were still able to perform stratigraphic profiles of the snowpack, perform tests with a new digital stratigraphic probe and take snow samples at a rate of 5 cm to investigate the particles contained.
Finally, there were some beautiful moments such as the Northern Lights or splendid sunrises.
