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Delayed funding, frozen grants… extra work, worry, uncertainty, and frustration… that’s just what I needed!

I haven’t managed to completely grasp the entire story and the background of the RCN* budget issues – as I’ve been busy trying to handle its direct consequences… how to get that student abroad to acquire the experience and access the labs he needs for his work when the mobility grant we were counting on is stopped? What about the instrumentation we were about to buy for TONe? the contract with the producer that we signed just before the red light was turned on over in Oslo? Can we still get it – and when? will it make the shipping deadline this autumn or will everything be delayed by a year? Or two or three? And what to prioritize – my instrumentation, or that of my colleague?

Those problems will most likely be solved – in one way or another – but what about my soft-money colleagues (and friends!) who depend on the calls and funding that is now being reduced, postponed, or removed? How many of them will have to leave science? Leave Norway?

Read more here: in English /

* Research Council of Norway, which allocates money for research and innovation in Norway.

Norwegian

What can be more suitable when Norwegian&Swedish royalties visit a new Swedish research ship than to have Irina from University of Gothenburg tell them about the Norwegian-Swedish collaboration in FJO2RD? Håkon (the Norwegian crown prince) didn’t know where Masfjorden&Lurefjord were located, but now he does! – and I bet Irina taught him a thing or two on foraminifera and fjord de-oxygenation too!

Well done Irina – we’re happy to have you on the team!

Want to know how to involve students in the design of your oceanography class and to “co-create learning”  – then read Mirjam and Kjersti’s recent paper “Co-Creating Learning in Oceanography“. They explain how to climb the ladder from “teacher controls everything” towards “student-staff partnership”, where the students have full control of their own learning. How far up the ladder you want to climb is up to you – and the students – but Mirjam and Kjersti give easy-to-include and adapt examples all along the way!

I’ll be teaching again this spring – helping Mari with the course in fjord oceanography – we’ll see where on the ladder we end up, but it sounds like a good idea to have the students determine the topic of their term papers based on keywords that Mari and I provide!

So – the defense is over – Eli did a splendid job presenting and defending her thesis and she can now put a “Dr” in front of her name! Congratulations Dr. Børve!

I’m happy with my contribution – although I keep wondering when I will stop being nervous (Eli on the other hand didn’t seem nervous at all, but “calm as a fridge”, as we would say in Swedish). I do realize that being nervous is such a waste of energy – but how do you stop?

Afterward, I found an e-mail from a colleague who had watched the defense in my inbox, telling me he thought I had done a good job. That one line was very much appreciated – we should write more e-mails like that!

Tomorrow, Eli Børve (UiO) is defending her PhD-thesis “Tides and Transport: Application to Lofoten and Vesterålen, Northern Norway” and – for the very first time I’ll be standing “on the other side”, as an opponent. Or standing –  I guess I’ll be sitting, in front of zoom… without flowers, Champagne, proud parents, and everything else that normally comes with a PhD-defense….

Eli has done an impressive job during the last couple of years, working with high-resolution models to study non-linear effects of tidal flow in the many straits of the Lofoten archipelago. I’ve learned a lot while reading her thesis, and I can assure you that it is much more exciting than it may sound! If the tidal current is strong enough, and if the strait opening is abrupt enough – then two vortices may form, one on each side of the strait, that “auto-propagate” (i.e. they move faster than the background tidal current) far enough from the strait opening that they are not caught by the currents when the tide turn. When this process (“tidal pumping”) is at play the transport through the strait, from e.g. the spawning ground of Cod on one side to the open ocean on the other side, is much greater than if the tides were just moving the same water back and forth… pretty cool!

Much of Eli’s work is already published – and I’m sure she will do just fine tomorrow!

Hopefully, I’ll do too… although I’m admittedly a bit nervous!

(and if you want to learn more about tidal effects on ice shelf melt in Antarctica (guess who came up with the topic!) – then have a look at Eli’s trial lecture here! )

Troll is the Norwegian research station in Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica. It was established in 1989 as a summer-only station, and since 2005 it has been manned (and womened) also in winter and, hipp hurray, we just learned that the Norwegian Research Council has decided to support a large upgrade and expansion of the research infrastructure at the station!

I’m involved in the “ocean package” which involves a continuation of the sub-ice shelf moorings at Fimbul, APRES deployment (to measure basal melt rates), and open ocean moorings on the slope. Here you can read about how the ocean influences the Fimbul ice shelf and about ApRES recovery at Fimbul.

Many thanks to Christina and NPI who have put a lot of effort into putting all of this together – I look forward to (continuing) our collaboration!!

My Python enthusiasm was severly damaged yesterday as I (after a lot of head-scratching) realized that it is not my programming that makes things look strange, but an error in the cartopy* package – when plotting vectors (such as e.g. currents from moorings) in a map using quiver, the vectors are wrongly transformed and end up pointing in the wrong direction… when googling the issue I quickly found solutions and workarounds (thank you StackOverflow!) but still… if I hadn’t tried to plot my scale vector at a 45degree angle I might never have found out…

So, what else can I not trust?

* a Python package to e.g. plot maps