An Arctic regular flight Sep 11 2026

This article is part of the series “2026-09: Canada”.

Saturday, 5 September. I am about to take my longest and furthest flight ever: from Amsterdam to Vancouver, West Canada. Annika had tickets for the same flight, but she was not allowed to travel because of issues with her eTA (Electronic travel authorization) and also because of the complete absence of a functioning customer service at KLM which we both have tried to contact for days, but in vain. So she will fly the next day.

My flight departs at around 16 o’clock and after a short time we leave the coast with the sandy beaches behind and are above the North Sea. Although Vancouver lies further south than Amsterdam the long flight goes north. It is shorter. We fly north of Iceland and over the Norwegian island Jan Mayen, which I cannot see because it is cloudy. Then the clouds begin to disperse and I get a view, first of a field of ice floes and then of the next mainland: Greenland. I am glued to the window to see these extraordinary views starting with the elongated island Store Koldewey. More and more mountain chains, bays filled with small ice floes come into view until the Greenland Ice Cap takes over and everything becomes white, first of ice, then because of a layer of clouds.

Some hours later holes start to appear in the layer of clouds and I can see other polar landscapes, those of Arctic Canada. We fly over Ellesmere Island, Axel Heiberg Island, Cornwall Island, Bathurst Island and Victoria Island. Then the mainland: a bit of mainland Nunavut and then the Northwest Territories, where I get a view of its largest lake Great Bear Lake, the eight-largest lake of the world.

Only slowly the landscape changes. There is less and less ice and part of the Northwest Territories is characterised by a large number of lakes, some of them dried-out and a red hue that makes it look like the surface of another planet.

After a while the landscape seems to have changed again. It takes me a couple of seconds until I realise, there are trees growing there. Now there are also more and more streets – probably dirt roads and then houses and fields, small towns and finally a big city: Metro Vancouver.

You see the beaches on the last photo? Two days later Annika and I will have a swim there, our first time in the Pacific Ocean.

Ice station two and icebergs Aug 26 2024

This article is part of the series “2024-08: Fram Strait cruise KPH”.

When I woke up in the morning of the 20th of August my first thought was: will there be another ice station? I peeked through the port hole and – yes – we were at least in the ice. From the helicopter deck it looked like this:

Round nine o’clock the ice station is started. Eleven people are involved – four scientists and students actually doing science, a polar bear guard on the ice and two times three bridge watches taking turns to observe everything from above. I take the morning shifts, the weather is not good for drone flying anyhow. Yesterday we had a lot of polar bears on the ice, today it is quiet. It is more the fog that could lead to problems, but even the visibility is ok. Good luck.

In the afternoon it has become too windy to fly the drone. I get onto the ice anyhow to take photos for outreach. Time to show people doing research on the ice. It is a lot of manual work. Carrying things down the gangway, pulling sledges, using drills with coring equipment, a saw to slice the ice cores, a digital thermometer and for a lot of data – paper and pencil. This may sound antiquated but writing down notes works often works better in harsh environments than using electronics.

Ice work I: pulling equipment (Lia Herrmannsdorfer, NTNU in the front)

Ice work II: taking cores (Henrik Fisser, UiT and Dmitry Divine, NPI)

Ice work III – measuring (Henrik Fisser, UiT and Dmitry Divine, NPI)

Ice work IV – writing down data (Henrik Fisser, UiT)

Ice work V: measuring an ice core (Alexandra Pliss, NTNU)

Later, just before dinner people who never have stood on the sea ice before become an opportunity to do that. I was on the sea ice three times since yesterday, so I volunteer for bridge watch again. The weather has become more and more nasty. It is raining and wind is blowing with temperatures round +1 °C. So it looks from the bridge:

At 17:30 (dinner time) the second ice station is finished. Now we will head back more or less the same way we came from. I take some photos from the helicopter deck, especially from the turquoise coloured melt ponds that I have never seen before like that.

Melt ponds on the sea ice in the Fram Strait I

Melt ponds on the sea ice in the Fram Strait II

Melt ponds on the sea ice in the Fram Strait III

At 9 o’clock we reach the ice edge and sail through the open sea again. Time to say farewell. I do not know when I’ll may see my beloved sea ice again.

Anyhow one thing was different than on our way there some days ago: icebergs are drifting on the sea. We see a lot of them on this and the following day. Some of them are small or medium sized …

… one of them was huge. I am able to take a drone photo from above. I estimate that the cliff to the right has a height of 10-15 metres.

There was one difference between the two ice stations. It is visible on the map:

While the 2nd ice station started and ended at the same place, the 1st ice station didn’t. This is because the 1st station was on drift ice while the 2nd station was on fast ice. Fast ice is either grounded or it is connected to land, in this case Greenland.

Although Greenland with islands was more than 50 km away it was visible on the 19th of August. I was really surprised and also happy – I have never seen Greenland before. And I managed to take some blurred photos (cropped image, 600 mm focal length).

Feels like I should visit that place sometimes …