National Geographic on Svalbard

Polar bear at Svalbard, Norway - Photo: Kristina Lind

National Geographic has published an interesting article on Svalbard.

Ice Paradise
Five minutes past midnight in Svalbard: The wild world is awake and clattering. At the edge of a sheltered estuary in the Adventdalen, a valley on a cluster of islands halfway between Norway and the North Pole, a flock of arctic terns soar and wheel in the perpetual daylight. They’re agitated. A pair of glaucous gulls—chick snatchers, egg stealers, the Arctic’s formidable winged predators—are approaching from the east. The terns put up a fierce defense. They flash their red beaks at the gulls and turn themselves into a cloud of sharpness.

The gambit works. The gulls bypass the terns and circle inland, passing over a pair of ground-nesting eiders, a kennel of sled dogs, and a solitary reindeer feeding on the tundra…

More info about Svalbard at visitnorway.com

Norway runs out of storage space for snow…

Norway runs out of storage space for snow ploughed from the streets of Oslo in the snowiest winter for two decades.

Authorities are being forced to dump tonnes of snow into the sea with more winter weather on the horizon and overfilled snow depots unlikely to melt until September.

Watch the movie clip from Oslo at Reuters.

Summer in full swing up north

 

While southern Norway seems ready to wash away after weeks of rain, northern Norway is basking in sunshine and warmth that rivals that found in the Mediterranean.

“We have really deserved this,” Marion Skaugvoll tells Norwegian newspaper VG while out sunbathing at Telegraph Bay outside Tromsø.

Temperatures have approached 30C in some areas of Trøndelag and northern Norway, and the 25C recorded at Mosjøen and Saltdal in the county of Nordland has delighted residents and tourists alike. Some people have even taken the plunge into the fresh Arctic water. 

The warm weather up north is expected to continue for at least another week. Only eastern parts of Finnmark, Norway’s most northern country, were chilly at about 8C, but at least the sun was shining.

State meteorologist Trond Lien said a low-pressure system that had settled over Great Britain was allowing the northerners to enjoy summer to its fullest, not least since the midnight sun is still shining.

Meanwhile, Southern Norway was told to brace for another 10 days of rain and temperatures around 17C. Bad news for an area already saturated with rain. 

 

Record temperatures

 

Southern Norway is seeing a heat wave that is unusual for this time of year.

In many parts temperatures have reached levels associated with Mediterranean summers, with temperatures above 30 C. And the forecast is for more of the same for the first part of the coming week.