For weeks, I’ve been collecting soil samples in the northernmost village on Earth. This might make you wonder: why study these soils and their tiny organisms here when their habitat, the tundra, covers about 8% of our planet? There were surely other, more accessible, places to do this research. Well, in addition to its cutting-edge equipment, Ny-Ålesund is also the ideal base for my research because it is close to two experimental sites (Knudsenheia and Kongsfjordneset, see map below) that can help us understand how Arctic soil ecosystems respond to climate change. They offer a unique chance to explore how shifts in soil temperature and moisture impact the soil communities and their food webs, shedding light on how tiny organisms like nematodes and protists will react.
Fences to gather snow at Knudsenheia
A three kilometer mountain bike ride from the village and a short walk across the tundra gets me to our first experimental site located at Knudsenheia. These bike rides are always a strange mix of exhaustion and exhilaration. Exhaustion because the weight of my team’s gear, which is always attached to my bike with a carriage, feels like it is conspiring with gravity itself, making every meter feel like a battle. Exhilaration, because every ride feels like I’m being drawn deeper into a place that looks like it belongs in a painting, not in my life.
During these rides we pass the Red River— which originates from a melting glacier and has a striking red-brown colour due to a high iron content and debris. Where it mouths into the fjord, there is such a stark contrast between the deep red river water and the clear blue sea. This contrast is not just visually striking but also a saddening reminder of climate change’s impact: as glaciers melt and river flows shift, the delicate balance of these ecosystems is increasingly disrupted. And so, every time I bike past that crimson streak bleeding into the blue, I always feel a raw, furious realisation that that beauty I am witnessing is also the harbinger of the new, anthropogenic world I will grow old in.
Most bike rides are misty, windy, and cold. The silence is surprisingly loud —wind slices through every layer of clothing, stealing whatever warmth is trapped between me and my thermal gear. Yet, despite the harshness, there is also a strange calm in it, almost meditative. The mountains loom around us, their jagged silhouettes barely visible through the thick fog, like ancient giants keeping watch, as if testing our resilience with every pedal stroke. Reindeer often cross our path, their massive antlers rising out of the mist like ghostly figures. Each one seems like a quiet statement of survival, a reminder that out here, we are all just trying to endure the pull of the land, each of us locked in our own quiet struggle against nature's demands. Sometimes, an Arctic fox would skirt by in the distance, a flash of white and brown against the muted tones of the tundra. It moves with such ease, barely disturbing the landscape, as if the struggle that grips us holds no power over it. Watching the fox feels like a warning of how out of place we are here—clumsy in our layers, fighting against every gust of wind, while it thrives in the very elements that challenge us.
Once we finally arrive at Knudsenheia, the vast, infinite tundra is suddenly interrupted by an arrangement of snow fences—set up by my PhD supervisors in 2017 as part of a long-term experiment. These fences were placed in two distinct tundra environments: one in a dry area higher up the slope, and another in a wetter area lower down. The snow fences cause snow to accumulate on the downwind side, increasing water availability and offering protection from cold, dry winds and harsh radiation. By comparing the effects of snow accumulation in both the dry and wet tundra, we gain valuable insights into how snow cover influences the presence and activity of, for example, microbial organisms like nematodes.
Warming chambers at Kongsfjordneset
The second site, at Kongsfjordneset (“the nose of the King’s Fjord”), is 10 kilometers away from the village and only accessible by boat. It is home to a long-term warming experiment set up in 2014 by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), with 24 open-top chambers that simulate warmer air conditions, mimicking Arctic’s future climate under global warming. The landscape here looks so different compared to the snow-fence site. Here, we are in a moraine—a geological formation created by debris left behind by retreating glaciers. It’s a vast, grey expanse, composed of rocks and tiny fragments of soil, giving it an almost otherworldly appearance. The terrain feels like a barren moonscape. The ground is a patchwork of smooth stones and scattered pebbles, devoid, mostly, of the familiar tundra flora. The warming chambers, clustered together amidst the colorless, flat expanse, resemble a remote lunar base of a tiny subspecies of humans or aliens.
Credits: Ruben Van Daele
A Typical Day in the Field
Days here start early—a bit too early some mornings. I fuel up with coffee and a big breakfast, eating like a bear readying for hibernation, because out here, calories are your best friend. My thermal layers? They’re practically infused with my skin. And the weather? Well, it’s never predictable. One minute, I’m putting on sunscreen and grabbing sunglasses; the next, biting winds are whipping through my buff like it’s not even there, or rain pelts down, soaking everything in minutes. After training on polar bear safety and learning how to shoot a flare gun and hunting rifle, I head into the field daily with my colleagues, always equipped with a walkie-talkie, uncountable layers of clothing and a profound excitement for the adventures ahead.
Most days are spent between our two field sites with the climate change experiments. At the snow-fence site at Knudsenheia, I collect both surface soil and deeper samples to measure edaphic factors (a nerdy term for soil characteristics) like moisture and pH—conditions that heavily influence microbial life. We also take subsamples for DNA analysis, using 16S to study bacteria and 18S for micro-eukaryotes like protists. We sequence certain parts of these molecules to find out what organisms are present in a soil sample. Doing so, we can, for example, identify to what extent nematode communities are different in the soil samples collected at the snow-fence sites and at the control plots at Knudsenheia.
Credits: Ruben Van Daele
At the warming climate simulation site, we take samples to extract DNA and RNA, which allows us to capture the active community. While the DNA indicates which organisms are present, the RNA goes one step further and tells us which organisms are actually functioning.
And when I’m not sampling, I’ve been reinforcing the warming chambers themselves, making sure they’ll hold up through the brutal Arctic winter ahead. Additionally, at both the warming chamber site and the snow-fence site, a postdoctoral researcher from Zurich, Xingguo, has been assisting us by measuring greenhouse gas emissions from our samples. This data will be linked to our research on changes in soil communities, helping us understand how shifts in these ecosystems might influence carbon cycling and contribute to climate change.
The boat rides to the warming chamber site have been unforgettable moments where I felt like a tiny speck against the vast, icy ocean and the towering mountains surrounding it. There’s something humbling about cutting through the cold waters, the Arctic wind biting at your face, while the fjords slowly stretches into the endless Greenland sea ahead. When we land on the beach, it's a scramble to unload gear while balancing on slick, stony pebbles, always on alert for the next gust of wind or a polar bear.
Credits: Ruben Van Daele
The Spiking Experiment: Tracing the Arctic's Soil Food Web
While DNA and RNA samples help identify which organisms are present and active, they don’t reveal much about the feeding interactions between these organisms. That’s where my spiking experiment comes in. In this experiment, I’m trying to understand how climate change—through increased moisture, snow accumulation, and warming—alters the entire soil food web structure. Specifically, I’m focusing on how these changes affect the complexity and stability of the food web, particularly for the various nematode groups I learned to identify during my master’s thesis.
Here’s how the spiking experiment works: I filled eight trays with chunks of soil collected from both natural plots and experimental plots at the snow-fence site and the warming chambers site. Each tray was then "spiked" with 13C-labeled sodium bicarbonate to trace the flow of carbon through the soil food web over time. The idea is to see how carbon is absorbed by primary producers, like algae and cyanobacteria, and how it moves through different trophic levels (a fancy word for position in the food web), including bacterivores, fungivores, and predators. By following the carbon, we can analyse how increased temperatures and moisture affect the food web's structure. At various intervals—specifically after 0, 12, 24, 48, 72, 120, 150 240 hours (~10 days)—I collected samples from each tray to isolate different organisms later in the lab. After filtering organisms based on size and enriching nematodes with special funnels, I’ll employ mass spectrometry (a method that measures the mass of molecules to help identify what they are and how much of them is present) to measure which organisms are feeding on what and how quickly carbon is cycling through the system.
Credits: Ruben Van Daele
Sitting alone in the quiet evening sampling these trays, with only the Arctic wind and the looming mountains as company, I felt a deep sense of peace. There’s something humbling about knowing you’re working with forces—time, temperature, soil—that have existed long before us and will continue long after. But at the same time, I couldn’t help but realise the irony of my research. These unappealing, brown, grainy boxes were destined to become the focus of two years of analyses and modelling. Soil ecology is such a curious thing, isn’t it?
In the final episode: what will we do with all this information? And how does it feel to spend weeks in such a remote, cold environment? If you’re too curious to find out, you can check out Ruben’s personal blog here: https://downandoutinsvalbard.wordpress.com/
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