00:02:10 [Bakke] We have been trying to do this trip for five years.

00:06:07 [Bakke] And we’ve had to turn back. So, I mean, you’re also pushing the limit.

00:11:01 [Bakke] Its not the safest type of expedition you do.

00:14:23 [Bakke] The main the main goal of this trip to actually figure out what’s the normal situation here in the Arctic over a longer time span. So that's why we are looking into the past, to see if we can see any time span in the past that could look like something similar to what we expect for the future. The main problem, if you want to go on the northeast side of Spitsbergen, if the ice is not far enough north it can very quickly come back in for the wind turns. You only have like 20 hours to get out of there. So, we’re actually not sure, still, if its possible to do it this year, either.

00:48:10 [Bakke] We’re going along the west coast.

00:51:08 [Bakke] And then we are sailing eastwards towards Nordaustlandet.

01:00:07 [Bakke] We’re ready!

01:01:05 [Acquarone] Its uncharted here. We are in uncharted water.

01:11:22 [Bakke] We’re going to take sediment samples in a lake called Ringgåsvatnet, which is just downstream from a small ice cap called Ahlmannfonna. They use these glaciers as indicators of past climate and also future climate, because they’re responding very rapidly to changes in precipitation and in temperature.

01:36:03 [Bradley] This is the furthest, extreme part of Svalbard. Its almost the northernmost position in Europe. Nobody’s ever been here before. What we hope, is that we can get our work done here quickly, before any ice comes in and closes the passage off. Otherwise, we’ll be here for the rest of the year.

01:59:06 [Bradley] So, we’ll ferry our equipment ashore and then carry it to the lake.

02:11:06 [Bradley] It’s a little further than I thought it was, and the lake is a lot bigger than I thought I was.

02:18:20 [Bradley] We’ll set up the two inflatable boats with the coring platform.

02:45:22 [Bradley] Lower the core tube down into the sediment. And get it positioned in the sediment. And then we start hammering. We have a big weight and we hammer that core tube down into the sediment. So, it’s pounding it down, one after the other. And eventually we’ll get it into the sediment five or six meters.

03:06:22 [Bradley] We wanted to come here because its essentially, what we might say, it’s the canary in the coal mine for giving some indication of how the climate’s gonna change in the future and how its changed in the past. So, what we want to do is get as long a core as possible from this lake. So, the longer the core, the more time will be represented. Potentially, a historical record of the environment that extends all the way back from the present day, all the way back 10 or 12,000 years.

03:38:15 [Bradley] Its like a library of information in those natural features. What we want to do is basically open that library and read the story that the sediments provide us.

03:57:19 [D’Andrea] Well, that’s 21; the lake.

04:00:06 [Van der Bilt] Right, 17 meters.

04:09:22 [D’Andrea] So, I was expecting to see a giant color change at the time when the glacier, on this side, was big enough to feed down into this lake. So, if we can mark the timing when we stop receiving so much sediment from this glacier, we know when it shrunk. This allows you to try to model how much temperature changed to allow that glacier to shrink to a certain size. These are the things that we’re trying to tease apart my collecting lake cores from different parts of the archipelago.

04:44:14 [Bradley] Its hard core science. The real analytical part takes place in the lab, but people always forget when the see a graph on a piece of paper all the hard effort that went into getting that.