Polar bear, German kayak padler and oil spill (?)

Seeing walruses and whales yesterday made us believe that we would see polar bear very soon, but unfortunately; no polar bear in sight. At least not alive ones. This night although, two teams in light weight boats inspected the coast line, because another vessel had observed a dead polar bear. In such situations Sysselmannen tries to find the animal. Some times they bring it to Longyearbyen, and some times they take samples for research and for preventing environmental crime. However, they couldn't find it. It might have been eaten by one of its friends....

We have of course inspected ports of refuge and discussed potential conflicts today too. The status on communication links are the same as for the northern parts of Hinlopen; we have MF and HF connection via Isfjord radio, VSAT has been stable from west end of Freemansundet and Iridium is stable to a certain degree. (There are some drop outs and the package loss is rather high). We were in a potential situation where we could really demonstrate the nice effects of having broadband connections at sea: We thought we had discovered oil spill. A 1.5 nm line of some oily emulsion was reported from bridge. A team went out and collected water samples. It appeared not to be oil, but IF it had been oil, we were ready to perform an analyis ad hoc on the vessel. We could have downloaded AIS data* delivered by AISSat-1, the Norwegian AIS satellite which was put into orbit the 12th of July this year. This satellite orbits the earth around the poles, and reports AIS targets to land earth stations (and to the Norwegian Coastal Administration) approximately every 2nd hour. We could also have downloaded satellite images from KSAT, and by combining this information with an oil drift model from SINTEF we could have identified the source of the oil spill. And IF we had been able to identify the source, it's possible they had received a phone call from someone interested in keeping oil spill off the sea :-)

* AIS means Automatic Identification System, it reports identification data such as e.g. position, speed and ID of vessels. It's mandatory for SOLAS vessels over 300 gross tonnes, but often other vessels also install AIS.

The last keyword from the title of this blog post was the German kayak padler. He is now identified as a German freelance journalist, who has been padling around Svalbard for 7 weeks, whereof 5 completely alone...He had some problems with his eqipment and needed assistance from KV Svalbard. He's now safely onboard, and will travel with us to Longyearbyen. He has of course told us facinating stories of meetings with polar bears, 5 in total. One appeared to be agressive and 4 seemed friendly.... :-)

Today's interview object is Morten Ekker: Morten is 51 years old, lives at Stjørdalen, a few kilometers north of Trondheim (in my opinion a very nice place.... :-) ), works at DN - Directorate for nature management as senior advisor. DN is responsible for conservation of animal life and nature protection in Norway, including Svalbard. He participates in the process of port of refuge selection in order to ensure DN's interests are being taken care of. AND, Morten loves to photograph, I guess he has taken hundreds of pictures of animals, nature and helicopters. You can see two nice example below, of a northern fulmar and a kittywake. In the picture above you can see Morten on the left, in conversation with Halvard. Morten has also taken the picture of Kvalvågen, a port of refuge at Svalbard.