AWIPEV Arctic Research base

Station name and owner

AWIPEV Arctic Research Base at Ny-Ålesund / Spitsbergen is operated by the German Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) and the French Polar Institute Paul Emile Victor (IPEV) which run their research stations as the joint French-German Arctic Research Base. Buildings are owned and provided in Ny-Ålesund by the Norwegian company Kings Bay AS.

Location

AWIPEV Arctic Research Base is located in the research village of Ny-Ålesund situated on the southern shore of Kongsfjorden on the island of Spitsbergen. The village hosts more than 10 national research stations which shares facilities run by the Kings Bay company. AWIPEV operates and runs a second research base Jean Corbel situated at 5 km southeast of Ny-Ålesund.

Climate data

Grey colours are WMO Climate Normals including maximum and minimum values. Blue colours are individual years.

Climate data for the stations where extracted via Copernicus Climate Data Store, from the global gridded reanalysis product: ERA5 monthly averaged data on single levels from 1940 to present. Description and source code: Roemer J.K. 2023. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10214922 Data Source: Hersbach et al. 2023. Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) Climate Data Store (CDS), https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.f17050d7

Biodiversity and natural environment

Spitsbergen belongs to one of the northernmost archipelagos in the Arctic. Ny-Ålesund on the west coast is an international center for various modern Arctic research activities. The village is one of the world's northernmost human settlements and is surrounded by glaciers, moraines, rivers, mountains and a typical tundra system. Most of the fauna living in Svalbard is represented in the area with birds (auks, kittiwakes, terns, barnacle geese, etc.), reindeers, foxes, polar bears and often visible in the fjord are seals and sometimes belugas and walrus.

History and facilities

Ny-Ålesund was a mining town for commercial exploitation of the coal deposits in the Kongsforden area from 1916 to the closure of the mines in 1963. After the mining activity Ny-Ålesund developed into a research village providing laboratories, facilities and research infrastructures to scientists from many nations interested in polar research. The French research base Jean Corbel was established in 1963 c. 5 km from Ny-Ålesund village and has a capacity of eight persons in the summer. In 2003, AWI and IPEV decided to jointly operate their three stations (Koldewey, Rabot and Corbel) as the AWIPEV Arctic Research Base. The station provides logistical resources: boats, snowmobiles, vehicles, storage facilities (cold and warm, cooling facilities), field equipment, workshop and office facilities and scientific resources: laboratories, scientific equipment and sampling tools.

General research and databases

Research covers a large field of scientific disciplines. Both, long term and short term projects of atmospheric studies, marine and terrestrial biology, as well as cryosphere studies, are carried out at the AWIPEV Arctic Research Base. Many different measurements as well as field expeditions are possible at the base. Prominent examples are atmospheric long term measurements, scientific diving, glacier expeditions, seabirds as indicators of global changes in the marine ecosystems, installation of measuring systems in the permafrost and in the fjord, and launches of research balloons. An overview on research programmes at AWIPEV and accessible data can be found at http://www.awipev.eu/science/ and the observatories are listed at http://www.awipev.eu/awipev-observatories/

Station Monitoring

Human dimension

There is no permanent population living in the area and activities are mainly linked to science. The local community is mostly a mixture of staff from the Kings Bay Company and scientists of various nationalities. Visits of tourists coming mostly onboard cruise ships for just a few hours are relatively frequent in summer. The closest town is Longyearbyen (population c. 2000). During the summer season the Ny-Ålesund population reaches 150-180 persons down to the 30-40 permanent staff during the winter months. Three persons constitutes the AWIPEV Arctic Research station permanent staff.

Access

A regular air shuttle service organized by Kings Bay AS with a small plane (14 passengers) connects Longyearbyen with Ny-Ålesund. The flight takes c. 25-30 minutes. Access is also possible by ship but there are no regular ship transport to Ny-Ålesund. Transport of freight is possible with a monthly freight ship except during winter. Fjord shores and islands are easily accessible using small boats and local transportation is possible by cars, snowmobiles or bicycles.