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plants, roots and permafrost

19 July 2025

Simone Lang (University Centre in Svalbard), Juul Limpens, and Rúna Magnússon (both from Wageningen University) are currently in Ny-Ålesund working on a study about how plants, moss layers, and organic soils help insulate the permafrost under warming air temperatures. They are doing this research at existing permafrost monitoring sites around the Ny-Alesund area, where long-term data on temperature and thaw depth data are available.

That means they are doing a lot of plant surveys, measurements of the height and thickness of moss and organic surface layers, and of the depth of the thaw depth (the depth to which the soil in unfrozen). Measuring thaw depth is tough and demanding work: it involves manually hammering a blunt metal rod into the ground until it hits the frozen layer and cannot go any further.

To reach a remote permafrost monitoring site at Kvadehuken, the team took a Polar Circle boat provided by the Norwegian Polar Institute, and Guido joined as a bear guard. Around midday, a VHF call came through warning that a polar bear was approaching the area. The team quickly wrapped up their work and returned to the boat. Later that afternoon, they heard the bear had indeed come ashore near their site.

In addition, Rúna is working on a study of Arctic willow growth, using tree ring analysis. To do this, she, Juul, and Simone carefully dig out the entire branch and root system of a single small shrub. Last year, she collected samples from a rainfall experiment. This year, she is sampling old experimental plots from Jelte Rozema, where the ground was artificially warmed years ago using small greenhouse chambers. The growth rings of these often decades-old shrubs can tell us how they responded to warming in the past—and what that might mean for shrub growth on Svalbard in a warming climate.