Saturday, June 19th

We spent the morning listening to Yves Frenot, director of IPEV, speaking about sub-antarctic research, focusing on French Austral Islands. Among other things we learned about the climate and the history of the islands and considered its influence on the islands biodiversity. Yves Frenot is Director of Research at CNRS and Director of the IPEV, the French Polar Institute. He highlighted the purpose of this summer school regarded as stepstone for further French-Swedish collaboration and an inspiration for other bilateral projects.

Emmanuel Lemeur then hold an interesting lecture about glaciers and how they can be an indicator of climate change. He began with a rapid overview of the different forms of ice on Earth before he put the focus on glaciers and ice sheets. Finally he explained how a glacier/ an ice sheet works and why they are interesting for climate/environmental purposes. The next two hours (after lunch) consisted of a practical climate-modeling workshop. Emmanuel Lemeur is a researcher at LGGE (Laboratoire de glaciology et géophysique de l’environnement) in Grenoble and he teached at the university.

Gunhild “Ninis” Rosqvist, head of the Department for physical geography and quaterny geology at Stockholm University and director of Tarfala station, continued speaking about glaciers and climate change. She also presented the Swedish Research Platforms, Tarfala and Abisko, and the most important Swedish glaciers for research.

The last activity for this day was the student presentations. The turn had come to the group 2, which is composed of Elin Högström, Anouschka Hof and Mathieu Laparie.