Ice & Aurora

Last Sunday we met up with a friend from Norwich, Nina. She's a PhD student in the same project that I was in, and she was in town for the Arctic Frontiers conference. We picked up her and Svetlana (Nina's friend from Russia) from their hotel in town, and we drove to Håkøya - the same place I took the sunset photos in the last post. We had a VERY cold spell in Tromsø last weekend. The lowest temperature measured was -15, for the first time since 1998! Combined with a strong wind, it was seriously freezing. We went for a short walk on the beach. Here's a photo of Nina (on the left), Svetlana (middle) and me, and one of Nina and Svetlana.

It was beautiful there, with lots of big pieces of sea ice lying on the beach. We spent some time taking photos before running back to the warm car...

We drove back to town and stopped underneath the bridge between Tromsø island and the island of Kvaløya. Svetlana wanted to take some pictures of the bridge. I had never stopped there, but it was really impressive to stand underneath the bridge!

Our next stop was Prestvannet, the lake on top of Tromsø island. We've hardly had any snow this winter, which means that you can skate on the lake! There were quite a few people braving the cold wind. I was hoping to go skating too, but as we're in the middle of moving my skates were somewhere in a box and I couldn't find them.

After our visit to the lake we were really frozen and went for a cup of tea inside :)

I have finished my training at work now, and I've started with the parallel shifts. Very exciting! I'm now writing forecasts "for real" and I'm learning a lot. They don't want me to do night shifts yet, but I have worked a few afternoon shifts (15:00-23:00) which aren't too bad. On Tuesday night I drove home from work and noticed some northern lights in the sky. When I came home, they were really bright, I could clearly see them even from inside the house. I quickly went outside to get some photos. The first photo is taken from the building plot in front of our flat, they're building a football field there. The second one is taken near our front door :) We thought it would make a great "we've moved" card, but as we've been subrenting this flat before we started renting it ourselves, everybody already has our address :D

The aurora was so good that we decided to drive to a beach near the north tip of the island. When we arrived there, it started to move like crazy, dancing across the sky. It was showing some pink as well, as you can see below - very impressive!

We stayed there for a while, enjoying the beautiful show. Luckily temperatures had climbed up that day, otherwise we would have never lasted that long! I played with the camera a bit, and asked Paul to stand very still...

We've been busy this past week with decorating our new flat. This is the first time for us to live in an unfurnished flat, so we needed lots of furniture and appliances. We finally have everything now and we can start to unpack all boxes. Tomorrow we're going skiing though, we FINALLY had a lot of snow. And on Tuesday my mum is coming to Tromsø for a few days, so I'm sure there'll be lots of photos to share next week :)

Ice

On Saturday we drove to Håkøya, an island near Tromsø. We noticed that large parts of the sea are frozen, something we've never seen before! It hasn't been especially cold, but it has been windstill and we had freezing fog (on the day the sun was supposed to come back) - so perhaps this caused the sea to freeze? The sun only comes up for a short period and by the time we arrived it was after sunset. The sky still had a deep orange colour though, and the views over the frozen sea were beautiful...

It was quite cold, so we didn't walk for too long ;) When we came back to the car, on one side it was getting quite dark while the lights were coming on...

While on the other side, the sky still had some colours, and was reflected in the very still water.

On Sunday the weather was overcast, and we decided to visit a waterfall near Ramfjorden. It was all frozen over, with spectacular ice formations! Below you can see Paul sitting on part of this ice fall, and some of the icicles that are part of it.

And some more ice formations.. the second photo is taken with quite a long exposure, which blurs the water flowing underneath the icicles.

It was a fun weekend! We also enjoyed the Tromsø International Film Festival last week. We saw 10 films, and we liked most of them. We thought we'd be fed up of going to the cinema by the end of the week, but we actually regretted it was over! Last night after watching our last film, we cycled to Telegrafbukta to watch the aurora from the beach, under a bright moon - a great end to the weekend :)

The Jurassic Coast

Or part 2 of our Christmas break ;) We spent New Year's eve with friends of Paul in Southampton, which was really fun! Some photos of that can be found here and here. As the weather forecast was looking promising, we had booked 3 nights in a really nice cottage near Charmouth, on the Dorset coast just after New Year. The cottage was a converted barn, I loved it!! The photo below gives an impression of the cottage inside and outside, and some of the views. Can I live there? :)

We woke up to a sunny day, and drove to Seatown (not to be confused with Seaton, not very far away and also on the coast...), a small village right on the coast with access to the beach. It's so beautiful there... the sand is a golden colour and there are steep cliffs next to the beach. But the reason people come here are the fossils! This part of the Dorset coast is nicknamed The Jurassic Coast, and is geologically really interesting. The cliffs you can see in the photo below (especially on the right) used to be the bottom of the sea, and are made of a sort of clay in which lots of fossils formed. The cliffs are continuously eroding, and it's quite easy to find fossils.

Below you can see an example of a belemnite, a sort of squid (extinct now). The bit you find is the back part of their shell, which is shaped like a bullet. Some of them are crystallised very nicely!

Another common fossil that can be found here is the ammonite. I found the one in the photo on the left! It's quite large, about 10 cm diameter. In the other photo Paul is trying to get a similar one out.

We had a really fun day searching for fossils, I was so fascinated by it! To finish our day, we climbed up to the Golden Cap, the highest clifftop (191 m) on the south coast of England, to watch the sunset - beautiful!

The next day we explored a different part of the coast, starting from Lyme Regis. The beach is very different here. At first it was rocky, until you get to this flat rock platform called a "wave cut platform". There are some big holes in it that look like dinosaur footsteps ;)

In the photo below you can see what the platform is really made of - LOTS and LOTS of ammonite fossils! They are very worn down, but it's impressive to see so many! Further on you can find very large ones on rocks on the beach. Very impressive!

Just to give you a sense of scale, here's one with my foot in it. Also showing how incredibly muddy my boots were from the previous day!

The next day it was time to head back... but as it was another beautiful day, we decided to take the scenic route home and see a bit more of the coast. Our first stop was Chesil Beach, a very long (30 km!) beach that is actually separated from the mainland. You can see it in the panorama below, taken from a viewpoint on the road.

The beach is made up of small stones and it's tough walking on it. We walked back further inland, through very high reeds, with nice views of a ruin in the fields (the same one you can also see in the panorama above).

We then continued to Durdle Door, a famous rock arch. The coast there is spectacular!

We spent quite a lot of time here, and I couldn't stop taking photos. The beach has a beautiful colour and it was just before sunset with very soft light.

A last view of the beach before leaving...

We drove the short distance to Lulworth Cove, just in time to watch the sunset. The rock formations are impressive, you can see all the layers. The second photo shows the village of West Lulworth, a nice little village!

This is the actual cove, or rather the entrance to it. The cove was formed when this entrance collapsed a long time ago, and let the sea come in.

And then it was time to drive back... It was a really beautiful trip! I've been wanting to see this part of the coast for a long time, and it didn't disappoint :)