How Climate Change Science Has Changed Due to COVID-19 Restrictions

In late 2019, expeditioners and guides Hilde Falun and Sunniva Sorby went to Norway’s remote Svalbard archipelago to complete a long-term goal of being the first female team to over winter in the Arctic. But the pair’s planned return home to mainland Norway coincided with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and pretty quickly they found themselves stranded. There had been plans for a ship carrying friends and family to come and collect them as the ice began to melt in March, but travel restrictions got in the way, and they couldn’t come home until September. So instead, they spent the winter and much of spring up until May in an isolated, tiny wooden hut high up in the Arctic circle, surrounded by winter darkness. There was a definite upside, though, at least for the global scientific community: just as the two were stuck in Svalbard, fieldwork by climate scientists and researchers came to a standstill, as those who would normally travel to the Arctic to monitor the levels of melting ice as the region transitions from winter to summer were stuck at home. Faced with prolonged Arctic isolation as the rest of the world dealt with a growing pandemic, Falun and Sorby started collaborating with the scientists unable to travel, collecting data and samples to aid their research. Their work proved so useful that, after they finally did get to go home, they came back to their little hut for a second winter at the end of 2020. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized climate change COVID-19 Source Type: news