Canadian award-winning Himalayan explorer Jeff Fuchs has spent the last 13 years documenting and tracking Himalayan trade routes. Obsessed with documenting the oral narratives of the heights and locals’ views on the environment and culture. Fuchs sees the two as being inextricably linked. Author of the Ancient Tea Horse Road and most recently the subject of the film documentary, The Tea Explorer, Fuchs lived in the eastern Himalayas for over a decade. Fluent in Mandarin and Tibetan, he is the first documented westerner to travel by foot the Tea Horse Road, the Pashmina Route through Ladakh (Hor’lam), and the nomadic route of Salt (Tsa’lam) through Qinghai province. He has led and been a part of over 30 Himalayan expeditions.

This stunning and daunting route, so vital to so many of the remote Himalayan peoples, somehow remained a virtual mystery to the west for almost 13 centuries – it is now hopefully getting its due and some of the acclaim it deserves, as one of the globes’s most daunting and incredible journeys.

Fuchs is co-founder of the Keep Center, a Nature School on the Big Island of Hawaii and spend is either in Hawaii or in the Himalayan regions. He goes nowhere without a huge stash of tea.

Presenter: Jeff Fuchs

Consider lending a hand to scientists by observing the world around you and reporting what you spot. Information that you and your students will collect as observers in monitoring programme can be used in numerous investigative studies and are a foundation of the comprehensive climatological study. This data are increasing in importance as the world faces more challenges posed by climate change. Those challenges include: higher temperatures, prolongation of warm seasons, more frequent storms, floods, droughts, and other forms of natural disasters. Even slight change in air temperature and precipitation can upset the delicate balance of ecosystems, and affect plants and animals that inhabit them. Rising temperatures and changing patterns of precipitation are influencing for example time and place of particular plant species occurrence.

Presenters: Tomasz Wawrzyniak, Anna Wielgopolan

During the lesson we will talk about the greatest earthquakes measured instrumentally: where did they occur, what were their effects and why such catastrophic phenomena occur in specific regions of the world. You will find out, how large were the shifts of rock masses and how long was the shifting of rocks during an earthquake.

The greatest earthquakes occur in the subduction zones, the places where the ocean plate penetrates the continental plate. Students will learn the mechanism of the great earthquakes and how they measure their magnitude.

Presenter: Grzegorz Lizurek

In this webinar, I will present the Svanhovd station to you in more detail, to inspire you to learn more about the importance of doing research so far north. I will tell a little about some of our 95 ongoing projects, and I will tell a little about how everyday life is up here. I want also to tell you how I make projects.

The research station NIBIO Svanhovd was established in 1936 as a testing and demonstration farm for agricultural development in subarctic areas by the ministry of Agriculture. Today the station is a part of NIBIO – the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research. We are established on the border of Norway towards Russia. From our cantina windows, we see into Russia. The 21 persons employed at the station, work on various aspects of subarctic agriculture or nature management. The work on brown bears is an important part of our work that draws a lot of attention from schools, media and tourists. Our aim is mainly to understand how the populations of the bears develop, and how individual bears use the area. This is important to know in order to avoid problem bears, i.e. bears entering villages and towns to search for garbage, or predating on domestic reindeer. Other work that we do includes biodiversity, climate, pollution (we are monitoring, for example, radioactive downfall), and agricultural productions, especially how to re-establish the old and local types of vegetables that have better resistance. One of the overall goals in all our work is to understand benefits and drawbacks of how we use the ecosystem services around us, and also to find ecosystem services that we don’t know of yet.

Presenter: Paul Eric Aspholm

On 29th of October we could observe the last sunset this year at the Polish Polar Station in Hornsund. After around two weeks of civil twilight we entered a period of continuous night, which will last until the end of January, with first apparent sunrise taking place on 12th February.

• Why does length of day and night depend on latitude?
• How dark is polar night at different locations within the Arctic Circle?
• What do reindeer have in common with the Earth’s rotation angle?

We will answer these questions during the lesson broadcast from the Polish Polar Station, covering rotational and orbital motion of Earth and their consequences, with focus on high latitudes.

Presenter: Katarzyna Budzińska

During winter, small cyclones – typically 200 to 600 km in diameter – develop in subarctic regions over areas free of sea ice. The most intense cyclones are called polar lows. These severe storms usually form when polar air is transported over maritime areas. This cold and dry air destabilises the lowest layers of the atmosphere when it arrives over relatively warm waters, creating a polar low.

Short-term forecasting of polar lows remains challenging, because they develop very rapidly, in areas with very few observations. The understanding of the formation of polar lows has been substantially improved with the advent of satellite observations in the late seventies.

Retreating sea ice exposes new ocean areas to extreme weather systems such as polar lows. Climate change could therefore potentially change where and when polar lows will occur in the future.

Presenter: Chantal Claud

Glaciers are large and dynamic stores of water, and are strongly dependent on climate and local topographic factors. Their mass depends on the balance between accumulation and ablation, and evolves through time. Glaciers gain mass by the input of snow and other forms of ice accumulating on their surfaces, and undergo mass loss (ablation) by melting, iceberg calving and other processes. Glaciers losing more mass than they receive will be in negative mass balance and so will recede.

During this lecture students will develop critical understanding of glaciology and its methods. The update mass-balance definitions and terminologies will be supported with photographs of glaciers and glacial landforms from Svalbard, the Alps, Alaska, the Andes and Patagonia taken by the lecturer. There will be some exercises to calculate the mass balance of a glacier.

Presenter: Tomasz Wawrzyniak

Is it possible to look deep into the Earth without digging a hole? Can we say something about the development of the area in the past by looking at “photos” from inside the Earth? How are these photos made? These so called “photos” are also known as reflection seismic.

These are some of the questions we will take a look at. A short introduction will be made to the reflection seismic method and also we will see how a geologist can work with data from the deep underground and how the data is interpreted. To summarize we will have a kahoot competition in the end of the webinar.

Presenter: Irena Aarberg

When we are thinking of the northernmost region of Earth - the Arctic - what comes to our mind first? Of course, polar bears! Those animals have high adaptive capacity to the unfriendly, Arctic climate, and every meeting with them is an unforgettable experience.

During the lesson we will be discussing about the ways of polar bears adaptation to the climate, how they react to humans, and what kind of equipment is required when you are in the area of "polar bear kingdom" (we will focus on Spitsbergen, the main island in Svalbard archipelago).

Presenter: Dagmara Bożek-Andryszczak

Palsas is an own rare type of nature occuring around permafrost land. Because of the warming climate, the palsas are melting and disappearing many places. In this webinar I will tell you why that may have consequences in the subarctic region and what the palsas tell us.

Palsas are created at mires covered with peat. It consists of a frozen core of ground material and water covered by peat soil. The peat insulate the palsas so they do not melt in the summer. The core of the palsa is a permanently frozen but will change size and shape through time as the palsas respond to changes in climate, the direction of the wind how and when the rain and snow is falling etc. Enrol and learn why such a rare nature type can be an important climate indicator.

Presenter: Paul Eric Aspholm

There are many applications of magnetic measurements in geophysics. We can obtain information on space weather conditions, model processes happening in the Earth’s interior, but also investigate the history of our planet- reconstruct past plate motions and date rocks. During this lesson we will talk about properties of the Earth’s magnetic field and how it can be preserved in rocks.

What does the geomagnetic field have in common with plate tectonics? Could Svalbard, an arctic archipelago, be located in the tropics at some point in the past?

Presenter: Katarzyna Budzińska

Bewick's Swan is a tundra species that nests in the Arctic regions on Europe and Asia. Every year, this bird flies several thousand kilometers from its wintering grounds in Western Europe to breeding sites in the Arctic tundra of Norway, Finland and Russia. Despite its beauty and low number it is still hunted. Moreover, significant changes of habitats along fly routes makes migrations of Bewick's Swans difficult and dangerous. In the year 1995 the number of Bewick's Swan was 29 000 birds. Till 2010, the number dropped dramatically to nearly 18 100. Can we stop their decline? Can we help migratory birds to fly over our heads freely and without any fear of their survival?

Guest presenter: Paweł Sidło, biologist from PTAKI POLSKIE (Polish Birds) - a non-governmental organization, dealing with nature conservation in Poland.