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On Saturday, January 11th, teams from the Belspo-funded ULTIMO and FROID projects headed home after each undertaking a very successful field campaign along with several crew, including  Simon Steffen and Doctor Martin Leittl who had been at the station for several weeks.

They were replaced by Eric Rignot and two colleagues from the University of California Irvine, who will work on the NISAR project; Paula Lampredapineda from the University of Ghent, who will spend five weeks in Antarctica for the BELSPO-financed PASPARTOUT project; and finally Bjorn and Quentin Vanhellemont, also  from the University of Ghent, who will work on the BELSPO-financed EXPOSOILS project.

New crew members include field guides Daniel Mercier and Manu Poudelet. They will be responsible for the safety of the scientists while in the field.

After they finish the requisite field training, and after the IPF team finishes putting the touches on the logistical support, the scientists want to head into the field as soon as this coming weekend.

Examining ice shelf dynamics

Professor Rignot and his team hope to spend three weeks on the King Baudouin Ice Shelf studying how it’s being affected by warming atmospheric and ocean temperatures. They will use various methods to look at the thickness of the ice shelf from the grounding line to the tip of the ice shelf at the coast.

Firstly, they will set up a second automatic weather station on the edge of the ice shelf that Simon Steffen had prepared before leaving (for the PEACE project). This will complement the AWS already installed at the grounding line. They will also install a GNSS antenna in order to measure any rise or fall of the ice shelf over time.

At various locations along the ice shelf, Eric and his colleagues will drill holes in the ice with a hot water drill and lower a CTD sensor to measure conductivity, temperature and depth into the ocean beneath the hole. This will give them an idea of how quickly the ocean beneath the ice shelf is warming.

Finally, they will take ground radar transects by hauling a radar sounder behind a skidoo in a grid pattern. This will give them an image of how thick the ice shelf is over its entire length.

During their stay at the coast, they will have the luxury of having one of the modified living containers with them. The container put together by IPF engineers has internet, a snow melter, a kitchen, and a living area. This helps make extended stays away from the station a lot more comfortable.

As Alain and Tim will be nearby preparing for the arrival of the cargo ship towards the end of this month, they will provide assistance to Eric whenever necessary.

Studying atmospheric particles

This year, Paula Lampredapineda from the University of Ghent will continue work that she and her colleague Sibylle Boxho from the ULB started last year studying atmospheric particles, their origin, and how they are transported to Antarctica through the atmosphere for the BELSPO-funded PASPARTOUT project.

Paula will head out to the coast for 10 days with IPF field guide Manu Poudelet to revisit a location that Sibylle had visited last year. This location is not far from where Eric will be stationed and where Alain and Tim will prepare for the offloading of the cargo ship.

Paula will bring to the coast a volatile organic compound (VOC) automatic sampler she had installed at PEA last season so it can start taking samples at the coast. Alain had installed a support battery pack, wind turbine, and solar panel so the VOC sampler can run autonomously for the entire winter.

At this location Sibylle Boxho installed a precipitation/snow sampler last season. The sampler rotated automatically every three months to collect precipitation from each of the year’s quarters. Paula will collect the precipitation samples and bring them back to Belgium for analysis.

Paula will also repeat what Sibylle did last year: dig a two-metre deep trench in the snow and sample snow layers going back several years to determine what kind of atmospheric particles have been transported to Antarctica over this period of time.

As Paula only plans to be at the coast for 10 days or so, she and Manu will camp out in tents. Conditions at the coast tend to be warmer and milder in general, so they should have an easy stay.

Sergi Gonzalez from the EPFL will also join them to continue taking photogrammetry of the snow surface over square metres for the CRYOS project along with snow samples at different depths.

Sampling microbial life

The BELSO-funded EXPOSOILS project is back at the station, with Björn Tytgat and Quentin Vanhellemont from the University of Ghent representing the project this year.

During their month-long stay, they plan to revisit nunataks the project has visited several times to take samples of microbial life in their regular locations, during day trips not far from the station.  

They will also collect temperature and humidity loggers, check open top chambers installed on most nunataks near the station. They will also get data from their time lapse cameras installed last season that can monitor how much snow accumulates and how much is ablated when the sun hits it.

Preparing for the ship to arrive

The big logistical task BELARE Team Leader Alain Hubert, Tim Grosrenaud, and the rest of the IPF team need to prepare for is the arrival of the cargo ship, scheduled to arrive on January 24th. Alain and Tim have been doing reconnaissance over the past several weeks along the Princess Ragnhild coast to find the best place for the ship to offload each time they’ve been in the area.

On the ship will be fresh food for the rest of the season and the following one, supplies for the station, materials for a hangar the team plans to construct during next season, and fuel for the vehicles. The ship will take back with it ice core samples the FROID project took during the season along with samples from the ULTIMO project (mostly sediments to be sorted to find micro-meteorites) and logistical equipment for the next season (transportation boxes, reefer etc).

It takes years of expertise to make sure the offloading process goes safely and smoothly. Alain and the IPF team have what it takes to make sure it gets done properly!

While previous successful meteorite recovery missions in 2009-2010, 2010-2011, 2012-2013, 2018-2019, and 2022-2023 focused on blue ice areas closer to Belgium’s zero-emission Princess Elisabeth Antarctica station, the 2024-2025 campaign took place in the remote Belgica Mountains of Antarctica, more than 300 km southeast of the research station. In addition, the team also recovered several thousand micrometeorites, cosmic dust particles less than 2 mm in diameter, and abundant ice and rock samples. This research has been made possible through funding by the Belgian Science Policy (BELSPO) and required heavy logistical support from the International Polar Foundation (IPF), mandated to manage the Princess Elisabeth research station by the Belgian Polar Secretariat.

The meteorite search team, consisting of three scientists from Belgian universities - Prof. Dr. Steven Goderis of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel as well as Prof. Dr. Vinciane Debaille and Dr. Gabriel Pinto of the Université libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium), and Dr. Hamed Pourkhorsandi, a research scientist at the Institut de Recherche pour le Développement in France - together with two IPF field guides Martin Leitl and Paul-Philippe Dudas, made a first stop in the Balchenfjella area in search of meteorites, before making their way to the Belgica Mountains on December 15th. The Belgica Mountains, located in the Queen Maud Land region in East Antarctica, were discovered by a Belgian expedition team during the International Geophysical Year Polar Expedition in 1958 during a reconnaissance mission by airplane. The reconnaissance had to be stopped after the airplane crashed on the blue ice there. The mountains were visited again by Belgian scientists in the 1960s, but have not been visited by a Belgian scientific team since then.

Meteorites can be found on blue ice fields near mountain chain where the ice is pushed up and eroded by strong katabatic winds. Systematic recovery programs have been running since the 1970s, as each meteorite holds relevant information about the formation and evolution of the solar system and the celestial bodies, including Earth, the Moon and Mars, as well as the arrival of water, volatile compounds, and organic matter to Earth, etc. 
Prior plans for travel by container convoy had to be abandoned for air transport due to difficult terrain. Conditions at the basecamp (essentially tents) were harsh, even for Antarctic summer, with temperature going down to -31˚C with the wind chill due to strong winds. The team of researchers would head out each day looking for meteorites on snow mobiles in a V-shaped formation, so they could cover large areas more systematically.

More impressive than the number were the types of meteorites found. The meteorites included at least two achondrites (stony meteorite representing planetary mantles), and several carbonaceous chondrites, the most primitive meteorites similar in composition to the original material of the Solar nebula, the giant, spinning cloud of gas and dust that formed our solar system about 4.6 billion years ago.

“Each new (micro)meteorite provides an essential piece of the puzzle we are trying to solve,” said Prof. Goderis about the importance of the samples he and his colleagues found.

“Based on some meteorite fragments, we can learn about planetary differentiation and collisions taking place in the early solar system, and in other fragments we find prebiotic molecules required for the evolution of life.” added Prof. Debaille.

The meteorites will be sent to the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels for defrosting, curation, and detailed classification, after which they will become available for research to the involved research teams as well as the international scientific community. The most beautiful pieces will be put on display for the public to enjoy.

A successful field campaign

On New Year’s Day, the team of scientists from the BELSPO-financed ULTIMO project returned to the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica from Mont Belgica via Basler transport plane. The team has spent nearly a month in the field collecting meteorites at two locations: Balchenfjella, and Mont Belgica. They’ve come back with 115 meteorites, 230 ice samples, 9 micrometeorite deposits, and numerous rocks.

Due to treacherous conditions between Balchenfjella and Mont Belgica, it became necessary to take the scientists across the glacier to Mont Belgica by plane and helicopter on December 18th. These aircrafts were kindly put at disposition by the SWIDA-RINGS project while waiting  for better weather condition for their field work.  Assisted by BELARE Team Leader Alain Hubert and Tim Grosrenaud, a Basler flight from Ultima Antarctic Logistics brought back the scientists and their equipment to the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica on New Year’s Day.

The ULTIMO team is very happy with their field campaign this season and look forward to analysing their haul in labs at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences and participating universities back in Belgium.

Making the most of their time

Meanwhile, scientists from the BELSPO-financed FROID project have also had a triumphant return from the field on January 6th. During their several weeks in the field, they took advantage of every day they’ve had in the field to drill shallow ice cores and take radar surveys of the bedrock beneath the ice around the Nils Larsen Blue Ice Fields southwest of the Sør Rondane Mountains, nearly 50 km from PEA.

While the scientists came back by skidoo, an IPF logistics team traveled out to their camp to haul back the scientists’ living containers, their equipment, and a reefer container that holds all of the shallow ice cores the scientists drilled this season at temperatures of -20°C.

With all of the ice core samples they’ve gathered (which will be analysed in a lab in Belgium later this year) and information they’ve gained from the topography of the bedrock (which will show where the bottom ice layers have been pushed up as they flow towards the mountains), the project team will be able to determine the best locations for drilling deep ice cores to find (hopefully) million year-old ice when they return next year with a drill that can core much deeper.

Keeping track of surface mass balance

In the meantime, Sergey Gonzales from the EPFL-CRYOS project has been taking photos of snow and ice around PEA - in particular sastrugi - the waves of frozen snow that are created by the strong winds in Antarctica. He’s been taking photos of standard square metres for photogrammetry study of the snow surface.  

The purpose of this exercise is to see to what extent the waviness of the sastrugi affects the albedo - the amount of solar radiation it reflects back into space from the snow surface. The more wavy the surface is, the more this affects the albedo. Monitoring albedo is important for studying surface mass balance of the ice sheet, as lower albedo leads to a higher absorption of solar energy, which in turn leads to a warming of the ice sheet.

The next step in the CRYOS project is to install a number of instruments on the tall mast at the station with the help of IPF’s field guide, Martin Leitl. However, they’ll need to wait until the weather improves, as a few days of inclement weather started just after the new year.

And for the 4th week in a row, the team of scientists and crew from AWI’s polar 6 aircraft has been trying to manage the logistical difficulties they’ve encountered with their plane, their equipment and the inclement weather. They’ve been trying to do radar surveys of ice shelves at the coast and their grounding lines as part of their contribution to the international SCAR-managed RINGS project.

Thankfully the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica is a very welcoming place that has been able to accommodate them for the duration of their trip, which has been longer than expected. We hope they will be able to complete their surveys in the coming days before finalizing their program from the South African Sanae station, and then finally the Norwegian Troll station.

During the last week of December 2024 and first week of January 2025, temperatures at the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica have peaked above freezing, reaching as high as 0.9°C. This has led to some interesting phenomena.

Not far from the station, in the wind scoop of Utsteinen nunatak, streams of water have formed and are meandering their way through several sastrugi, which are “waves” in the ice that the wind has carved out. It seems surreal to hear the trickling of water in a place that is primarily frozen most of the year.

A lot of snow has accumulated on the roof of the station’s annexes. With temperatures trending above freezing, it was necessary for the whole team to chip in one afternoon and shovel snow off of the roof to avoid pools of water forming on top of the annexes.

In general, snow accumulation in Queen Maud Land, East Antarctica, has been above average since last season. Several automatic weather stations and other scientific equipment throughout the region have almost been buried by snow. Greater snow accumulation can be a product of a warming climate, as warmer air masses can hold more moisture, which leads to greater precipitation.

Speaking of moisture, during the last week of December, a low-level fog hung around the station for about a day or so. It was impossible to see more than 20 meters ahead. The humidity was a whopping 80%! No one who had been at the station had seen anything like this at PEA, at least not in the past several years.

Very warm temperatures at the coast

Temperatures have climbed even higher in other parts of Queen Maud Land. This past week, scientists from the GEOMAG project from the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium went out to the King Baudoiun Ice Shelf with Alain Hubert and Tim Grosrenaud to take geomagnetic measurements at the same location where Belgian scientists took them back in the 1960s when Belgium’s King Baudoin station was still operational.

The GEOMAG team was able to successfully measure Earth’s magnetic field at the same location to see how it may have shifted over time. While these geomagnetic measurements had been taken a few times since the closure of the King Baudoin station, this is only the second time that such geomagnetic measurements have been taken since the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica has been operational.  

However, what the scientists and IPF staff found at the coast were temperatures hovering around +8 to +10 C. Being close to the sea, temperatures in summer can climb relatively high on ice shelves, with pools of water sometimes forming on them for several weeks during the summer.

While at the coast, BELARE Team Leader Alain Hubert and Tim Grosrenaud also did a first reconnaissance to find the perfect spot for the cargo ship to unload its containers and other material when it arrives in mid-January. This reconnaissance is necessary to do every year as it is essential to assess the conditions of various ice shelves where a cargo ship can land. The edge of the ice shelf must be solid with no imminent cracks that could be deemed an unstable danger. It must also not be taller than 7-8 meters to ensure that the contents of the ship can be safely unloaded.

With these kinds of temperatures observed at the coast, it’s not uncommon to see streams of water pouring off some parts of the ice shelves. While impressive to see, this of course can be concerning, considering there must be some serious surface melt occurring for these freshwater rivers to form.

While this region of Antarctica has gained a sizeable amount of mass over the past two decades, because of increased precipitation at the coast, the question arises if the ice will continue to be replaced quicker than the rate of melt taking place in summer.  Some of our scientists are studying exactly that phenomenon, and we’ll tell you more in the next instalment…

Hydrogen production begins at PEA

This season, a new engineer on the team, Mathilde Renard, together with Nicolas Herinckx, has been working on a new system at the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica to produce hydrogen to be used for several purposes using the station’s renewable wind and solar energy production systems.

Having arrived in mid-November, Mathilde has been working on getting the hydrogen production system up and running. The system uses electrolysis to split the hydrogen atoms off of water molecules - a process that takes quite some energy. The hydrogen produced is then stored in tank at the scientific north shelter.

When it needs to be used, the stored hydrogen can then be combusted to produce energy and water. The goal is to eventually use the hydrogen produced to power the backup generators at the station, which currently run on diesel (the generators are rarely used - only when necessary).

However at the moment, the first hydrogen produced at PEA is being used primarily for a different purpose: to fill radiosonde balloons that are sent up into the atmosphere every other day to collect weather data. Traditionally scientists have filled weather balloons with helium. However, due to its limited supply on Earth and the logistical cost and inconvenience of transporting it in bulky canisters, it was decided to start filling the weather balloons launched at PEA with hydrogen produced at the station instead of helium.

The inaugural weather balloon filled with hydrogen produced at PEA was launched on Christmas Eve, to much fanfare, and deservedly so! This milestone signifies the next step towards making the station even more self-sufficient and environmentally friendly.

Later that day, the entire team enjoyed a well-deserved Christmas Dinner prepared by the station’s chef, Thomas Duconseille.

A new hangar at the Winter Park

The IPF team also plans to work on a new hangar at the Winter Park, where many large vehicles, lots of spare parts, supplies, and scientific equipment will be stored on the blue ice field nearly 2 km from the PEA station.

The construction process involves digging several deep trenches in the ice for the foundation of the new hangar. Once the trenches have been dug, the supports for the new hangar will be put in place. As the temperature never rises above freezing in this part of Antarctica, water is then poured into the trenches to solidify the supports of the hangar. Situated between several nunataks, the ice around the Winter Park barely moves each year, making it a very stable place to build structures in the ice.

As all the parts for the hangar’s construction will be delivered by ship later in the season, the construction of the new hangar is planned to start during the 2025-26 season.

We’re looking forward to seeing everything the highly skilled IPF team will be able to accomplish before the end of the season!

Ongoing field campaigns

The BELSPO-funded FROID and ULTIMO projects continued their field work this past week.  At the Niels Larsen Blue Ice Field, members of the FROID team managed to drill several shallow ice cores, which are test runs for the deeper cores they plan to drill next season, when they hope to reach million-year old ice close to the elevated bedrock close to the Sør Rondane Mountains.

Meanwhile, the ULTIMO project has been able to collect several meteorites during their field trip, in spite of logistical difficulties. Initially the team had been stuck about 100 km from their ultimate destination, Mont Belgica, due to the large number of crevasses that the traverse team lead by Alain Hubert encountered along the way. However, thanks to logistical support from members of the Swida RINGS project led by Frederick Paulsen, which is examining the retreat of outlet glaciers in Antarctica. The Swida RINGS group initially had planned to stay at PEA for one night. But since they ended up staying for six days due to inclement weather where they wanted to go, they offered their support in lending one of their twin-otter planes to assist the ULTIMO project by flying the scientists and their equipment, including 6 snow mobiles up to Mont Belgica. For the next several weeks the team will continue to collect meteorites that can offer clues about the origins of the solar system; they are scheduled to be flown back to PEA on January 3rd..

Meanwhile, the IPF team continued to offer logistical support to AWI’s Polar 6 plane as it continues to take aerial surveys of the ice margin at the coast of the Queen Maud Land for the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research’s international RINGS project. They only have a few more transects to do before they head back to Norway’s Troll station several hundred kilometres away. Some technical difficulties have hampered their progress, but the IPF team has been available to help in any way they can to make sure they can finish the job.

Skidooing to King Baudouin Ice Shelf

Before heading back to Belgium, systems engineer Nico Herinckx along with Simon Steffen travelled 200 kilometers (oneway) on skidoo to service an automatic weather station that had been set up last year for UC Irvine glaciologist Eric Rignot as part of the greater NISAR project. The main objective was to replace the data logger to ensure the SBD iridium modem could transmit the data to polar orbiting satellites which ensures that the data can be viewed remotely throughout the year.

Eric will arrive in mid-January to continue studying to what extent warming water and ocean circulation beneath an ice shelf contributes to its melt. The plan is to monitor weather conditions above the ice shelf, as well as drill a hole through the ice shelf and send an unmanned robotic vehicle underneath it to measure parameters such as temperature and salinity. Most of the melt an ice shelf experiences comes from below, not on the surface. But we’ll tell you more about this project once Eric arrives in a few weeks!

Later this week Simon will head back to the coast at the L0 Ice Rise to set up infrastructure for the PASPARTOUT project. Paula Lampreda from UGent is also returning to the station in January and hopes to install a volatile organic compound collector at L0 to study the origin of certain atmospheric particles that arrive in Antarctica and atmospheric circulation patterns in the Southern Hemisphere. It will be in the same area where her colleague from the ULB Sibylle Boxho dug a snow pit to collect atmospheric particle samples in ice layers going back several decades.

A surprise visit

On December 18th, the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica was treated to a surprise stop to refuel by members of the CHINARE expedition who were rotating out after their stay at Zhongshan station. While their plane was refueling, the CHINARE team members visited PEA and met with BELARE team leader Alain Hubert, who gave them a warm welcome. The CHINARE team then went on to take a flight to Ultima Air Base where they boarded their connecting flight back to Cape Town.

Fresh faces

The Princess Elisabeth Antarctica saw its first crew rotation on Friday, December 20th, as our all around superstar, systems engineer Nicolas Herinckx left and was replaced by Benoit Hellebuyck. Two other IPF team members that will stay until the end of the season also arrived, Laurens Gonzalez and Mathieu Chable .

Scientists from two additional projects also arrived. The first group of scientists are from the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium for the GEOMAG project, which has been studying Earth’s geomagnetic field at the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica with instruments that have been installed in a special non-magnetic shelter a few hundred metres from the station and has been in operation since 2015.

During this season the GEOMAG teams also will head out to the site of the old King Baudoin station Belgium built in the late 1950s to take geomagnetic measurements in the same location the scientific teams from the BELARE expeditions from the 1960s took them to compare how Earth’s geomagnetic field on those locations have changed over the last 60 years. BELARE team leader Alain Hubert will accompany these scientists as they head out to the King Baudouin Ice shelf to provide logistical support.

The other batch of new scientists that arrived from the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, will work on the CRYOS project. This project has been running for almost a decade at PEA, tracking ice particles in the atmosphere to determine how much snow lands on the ground and contributes to growing the ice sheet, how many ice particles are blown away, how many sublime back into water vapour, and at what height above the surface different key processes happen.

Several instruments installed at PEA and serviced regularly by IPF staff (when scientists have not been able to travel to Antarctica) have been collecting long-term data. These data will contribute to a greater understanding of the surface mass balance of the Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Once they complete the requisite safety and field training all newcomers must undergo, they will get to work on their respective projects. 

Following their arrival at the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica station at the beginning of December, the scientific teams from the FROID and ULTIMO projects spent a week undergoing the required field training and preparation before heading out into the field to start their work.

And they’re off!!

After the IPF team spent weeks preparing the logistics for the scientific expeditions, last Saturday, December 7th, the FROID team left the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica to spend a month in the field on their respective research missions this season.

The FROID project headed out to the Niels Larsen Blue Ice Field and has been camped out there for several days. They’ve started to drill shallow 10-metre ice cores and perform radar observation of the ice and the bedrock.

The Niels Larsen Blue Ice Field’s ice has been produced by millennia of precipitation accumulation and compaction and is believed to be pushed up by the nearby Sør Rondane Mountains. Gravity forces ice in the continental ice sheet to flow towards the coast, and when it encounters mountains, they force the bottom layers of ice closer to the surface, making it easier to access older ice without having to drill several kilometres down into the ice sheet.

This season, the project only plans to test the coin techniques. Next season, they hope to return and drill ice cores deep enough to find ice layers that are more than one million years old. The air trapped in the bubbles that can be found in these ice layers give information about what the atmosphere looked like a million years ago on our planet.

A stop along the way

And on Monday, December 9th, the ULITIMO - project left in a caravan of two Prinoth tractors and several living containers.

While their ultimate goal is to reach Mont Belgica to try and find meteorites there, the team spend two days at Balchenfjella (eastern Sør Rondane Mountains) along the way, nearly 200 km from PEA. While there, the ULTIMO project team scoured the area for meteorites, as six years ago Steven Goderis from the VUB had found quite of few there. So far, four meteorites have been found by the team, which is not a bad start.

BELARE leader Alain Hubert took advantage of this time to go ahead to try and find a safe path along the remaining 120 km to Mont Belgica. The area ahead is filled with crevasses, so Alain’s decades of experience will come in handy as they progress. Hopefully the weather will remain clear for a few more days to allow them to reach their destination under good conditions!

Return of old friends

This week also saw the return of scientists and technicians from the Alfred Wegener Institute on their Polar 6 Basler plane. The team and the pilots will be spending a couple of weeks at PEA so they can continue taking transects at the coast of Queen Maud Land along the grounding line for the RINGS project, which has as its primary objective to develop a comprehensive reference bed topography dataset around the entire Antarctic coast. This will help scientists understand the processes responsible for current ice discharge, potential future ice-sheet retreat, and sea level rise.

Two Danish scientists form the SWIDA-Rings project (a part of the same international RINGS project) also visited the station with a Twin Otter to perform radar observations of the ice sheet around the southwestern part of the Sør Rondane Mountains. These data will be very valuable for the FROID project currently working in the area.

Seasonal maintenance

Meanwhile, the IPF team at the station has been doing seasonal maintenance of the wind turbines. One by one they’ve been lowering them and replacing worn parts before raising them back up and, ready for a new winter season ahead.

And for the PEACE project, Simon Steffen and Nicolas Herinckx are getting ready to install new parts on the series of automatic weather stations along the 250 km transect the project covers, from the Antarctic Plateau to the coast next week. They hope to service most if not all of the six stations in the project this season and install new CR3000 data loggers.

There’s going to be a lot of action until Christmas!

Siu-Tsiu was chosen as the winner among eight candidate startups from across the Arctic that submitted applications.

Set up in 2022, the  Laurence Trân Arctic Futures Award gives 7,500 Euros of financial assistance to a fledgling startup or young entrepreneurs based in the Arctic. This year’s winner was chosen by an international jury of experts on startups, innovation and entrepreneurship from various parts of the Arctic.

“We’re proud that this award will make a difference to a very deserving organisation that is doing so much to help young people in the Arctic upskill and improve their employment prospects,” said Alain Hubert, President and Founder of the International Polar Foundation while on mission to Antarctica leading the 2024-25 Belgian Antarctic Research Expedition. “The work they do is important for the cohesion and well-being of Arctic communities.”

The award ceremony was emceed by IPF Managing Director Nicolas Van Hoecke, IPF Board Member Piet Steel, Mr and Mrs Trân, and Patti Bruns, the Secretary-General of the Arctic Mayor’s Forum, who participated in the international jury of experts that chose the winner.

Pilo Samuelsen, Chief Operating Officer, SiuTsiu in Nuuk, Greenland, travelled to Brussels to accept the award on behalf of the social enterprise. He delivered very heartfelt remarks at the award ceremony upon receiving the award.

“We feel incredibly grateful and honoured to receive this award. It is difficult to describe the impact and meaning for everyone involved in our business.

First of all, this award highlights the importance of developing communities. With this award we feel that attention on socioeconomic enterprises in the Arctic and particularly in Greenland has been raised on a larger scale.

Second, this award presents us with the opportunity to showcase how a relatively simple model can bring about change for young people that need it the most. With this award we feel a bigger and deeper recognition and validation of our efforts.

Third, this award will boost our motivation to continue our project. We feel ambition growing in us and we feel more determined to come closer to our vision of a society that gives everyone the possibility to contribute and participate in developing our small communities. Socioeconomic business has proven to be a meaningful and effective approach in marginalized communities in Greenland.”

Secretary General of the Arctic Mayors forum, Patti Bruns gave the reasons behind the jury’s choice at the ceremony.

“Siu-Tsiu exemplifies the transformative power of community-driven innovation in the Arctic. By empowering marginalized youth and fostering a sense of purpose and belonging, they are building a brighter future for Greenland and setting a model for the entire region. The Laurence Tran Arctic Futures Award celebrates their remarkable achievements and the hope they will inspire for generations to come.”

Executive Director of the Arctic Economic Council Mads Qvist Frederiksen, who was not able to be at the ceremony but took part in the jury ,expanded on the reasons for their choice:

"Siu-Tsiu is a deserving winner of this year's Laurence Tran Award because of their ability to make a difference for young people in remote communities in Greenland. In the Arctic Economic Council we want thriving Arctic communities and Siu-Tisu helps to motivate people to make a difference locally. They tailor their solutions to the local context and have in recent years managed to scale up their solution."

Patti Bruns also recognised two honourable mentions during the ceremony: One is Air Vitalize from Alaska, which has invented solar-powered air filters that can be easily deployed in cities to improve air quality. The other is Sulacare, a startup founded by a Saami healthcare worker that invented a way to simplify the catheterisation process for women, leading to significant improvements in healthcare in remote Arctic communities.

Learn more about the winner and the honourable mentions by visiting their websites:

Winner 

Siu-Tsiu

https://siutsiu.gl/en/home/

Honourable mentions

Air Vitalise:

https://www.airvitalize.tech/

Sulacare:

https://www.sulacare.com/

Last week, International Polar foundation President and Founder Alain Hubert along with Tim Grosrenaud went on a traverse to the coast to retrieve the last of the cargo that was delivered at the end of last season. While at the coast, they discovered a plethora of marine wildlife. 

It’s quite common for members of our team to come across packs of penguins, weddell seals and seabirds when venturing close to the ice shelf terminus along the coastlines in this region of Queen Maud land, East Antarctica However, the land-based animals here are far outnumbered by marine animals that call this corner of the world home. 

The cold waters that surround Antarctica make for some of the world’s most oxygenated, nutrient-rich waters. These rich waters make for an attractive feeding ground for many ocean species. Naturally, these cold waters, rich in krill and other organisms, attract the ocean's biggest inhabitants as well as its apex predators. 

It’s not uncommon to see pods of orcas and other whales such as the Antarctic minke whale just off the edge of the ice shelf where they majestically bob and swim around the icebergs and sea ice navigating the sea in search of their next meal. 

However, the trip to the coast last week included a special surprise for our two-man team. When they arrived at the water's edge, they encountered a small pod of four Arnoux’s beaked whales (Berardius arnuxii) swimming quietly along the pack ice at a very short distance. This is in fact a very exciting and rare sighting. Even laying eyes on this species is extremely uncommon! 

The international community of marine biologists still know very little about these mysterious creatures that have been sighted predominantly in these fertile waters off the coast of Antarctica. Besides a handful of sightings, mainly in the Southern Ocean, there have been a few cases of the Arnoux’s beaked whale being washed ashore and stranded on the beaches of Argentina and New Zealand, which has allowed biologists to study their anatomy.

However, a dead whale tells you much less than one busy breathing and living in the water. Scientists have never had the opportunity to study this animal up close and in depth, which is why very little is known about their feeding behavior and how they live.

Although sightings are quite uncommon, due to the remote nature of their preferred habitat, it is believed that the Arnoux’s beaked whale is not endangered but rather it is just well acquainted at living a life out of the spotlight. A wise behavior that certainly explains why the species has never been targeted for commercial hunting. 

Besides enhancing our knowledge about the biodiversity and the conservation potential of the region, perhaps this most recent sighting of this rarely encountered species could inspire marine biologists to travel to this part of Antarctica to better understand the way these whales live and how climate change could potentially affect their habitat and livelihood.

This year's Arctic Futures Symposium will take place on December 2nd and 3rd at the Residence Palace in Brussels’ EU Quarter. The theme for this year’s symposium will be “Finding Solutions in Uncertain Times”, and will feature several keynote speakers plus six topical panel discussions, including:

• Building on Progress: Reflections and Aspirations from the Norwegian and Kingdom of Denmark Arctic Council Chairships
• Transatlantic Cooperation in the Arctic in 2025 and Beyond
• The Current Security and Geopolitical Status of the Arctic
• Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Regional Collaboration to Meet Arctic Challenges Sustainably
• Building and Maintaining an Arctic Workforce and Resilient Arctic Communities
• Critical Raw Materials and Resource Supply Chains: Tensions and Trade-offs

The symposium will be held the afternoon of Monday, December 3rd, starting at 2:00 pm and all day on Tuesday, December 4th starting at 9:00 am.

During the second day of the symposium, the winner of the Laurence Trân Arctic Futures Award will be announced. The annual award of 7500 Euros goes towards helping young entrepreneurs in the Arctic.

Registrations are currently closed as demand has exceeded  expectations. If you would like to make  request to be on the waiting list, please send an email to evenets@polarfoundation.org.

A record number of side events

This year will also see a record number of side events.

The Mission of Norway to the EU will host a cocktail on December 2nd.

Returning for its 6th edition, the Arctic Shorts film evening will feature eight short films made by Arctic filmmakers. It will take place at Cinema Galleries in the Centre of Brussels on December 3rd starting at 7:00 pm.

Then from 9:00 am until 2:00 pm on Wednesday, December 4th, Arctic Frontiers Abroad and the University of Bergen will host an event on Sustainable Ocean Development and the Green Transition at NH Carrefour de l'Europe Hotel in Brussels city centre.

This event will be followed by a screening of the film Twice Colonized with Aaju Peter, Director Lin Alluna and Producer Emile Hertling Péronard at the Permanent Representation of Denmark to the European Union 2:30 pm - 5:30 pm on December 4th.

The final side event will be Observing, Understanding and Responding to Arctic Change, which will be hosted by the INTERACT nonprofit and the Embassy of Monaco at Town Hall Europe from 6:00 pm until 9:00 pm on December 4th

Further details about these side events have been posted on the Arctic Futures Symposium website.

Please note that registration for the Arctic Futures Symposium does not automatically guarantee access to all symposium side events. Registration for each side event must be done separately by the organiser of that side event.

We look forward to welcoming everyone in Brussels next week!