Documenting the effects of climate change in Siberia

Annelen Kahl, a post-doc in environmental sciences and engineering at EPFL, will oversee a group of four EPFL students during a three-week stint at a high-tech research station on a Siberian island. She will post updates on the EPFL Out There blog. In northeastern Russia, the Lena River forms a delta with some 1,500 islands, the vast majority of which are uninhabited. Among them is Samoylov Island, a five-kilometer-square patch of land that is home to a highly sophisticated Russian research base - which looks like something out of a James Bond movie. It's in this forsaken corner of the Siberian Arctic that a team of six EPFL researchers will set foot on 19 August. The research station was built in 2010 to foster joint international research into the Arctic environment. Russian scientists work there year-round, teaming up with researchers from all over the world. Their projects draw on various fields of research. Samoylov station is an ideal location from which to study the melting permafrost. And that's exactly what drew the Swiss team. Working with the Russian researchers, four EPFL Master's students - Nicolas Jullien and Xavier Buchwalder (environmental sciences and engineering), and Annina Riedhauser and Flore Chappuis (physics) - will study the impact of climate change on permafrost and the snowpack. The student researchers will be supervised throughout the project by Franziska Gerber and Annelen Kahl, both post-doctoral researchers in EPFL's Laboratory of Cryospheric Sciences (CRYOS). Kahl will recount their experience on the EPFL Out There blog, which was created to highlight EPFL's scientific ventures abroad. Check out the first post from the mission #SiberianSnowpack : http://epfloutthere.tumblr.com/ . Digital models and weather data