This is not how sta­ti­on chef Erling Gus­tav­sen had pic­tures his fare­well from Bear Island (Bjørnøya): In mid May, he got pain­ful chan­ges to the skin on the ank­le. Tele-medi­cal con­su­la­ti­on resul­ted in some fear that he might have caught Sta­phy­lo­coc­cus spec. Final­ly, it was deci­ded to heli­c­op­ter-evacua­te him from Bear Island to get him into medi­cal tre­at­ment.

In the hos­pi­tal in Trom­sø, howe­ver, it tur­ned out that Gus­tav­sen had sim­ply burnt his ank­le in the sola­ri­um. He had, at the same time, used cream to cure pro­blems with his Achil­les heel, which makes the skin more sen­si­ti­ve to UV radia­ti­on.

The pati­ent is impro­ving rapidly, but he finds the sto­ry a bit embar­ras­sing. Effects of the evacua­ti­on of the chef on the meals for the remai­ning sta­ti­on crew on Bear Island are not known.

Source: Finn­marks­dag­bla­det

A very posi­ti­ve book review for the gui­de­book “Spits­ber­gen-Sval­bard” has recent­ly been published in the Czech Polar Reports, a peri­odi­cal for polar rese­arch. The aut­hor, Miloš Bar­ták, is Pro­fes­sor for Bio­lo­gy at the Masa­ry­ik-Uni­ver­si­ty in Brno (Czech Repu­blic). Among­st others, he wri­tes:

“Thanks to his per­so­nal expe­ri­ence with Sval­bard, the aut­hor wro­te an excel­lent gui­de …”.

“I would like to point out the pre­cise descrip­ti­on of plants and ani­mals that fol­lows a well-desi­gned sche­me”.

“Sub­stan­ti­al part of the book deals with histo­ry, geo­lo­gy and geo­gra­phy of Sval­bard. I find it very useful becau­se the­re are many infor­ma­ti­on attrac­ting both tra­vel­lers and polar rese­arch pro­fes­sio­nals. For each important loca­ti­on, detail­ed infor­ma­ti­on of the histo­ry of dis­co­very and/or sett­le­ment is given …”

“Throug­hout the book, the­re are many posi­ti­ve fea­tures that … pushes the book from a stan­dard turist gui­de to a hig­her qua­li­ty.”

“… the book is not only a per­fect turist gui­de attrac­ting peo­p­le to come and see but also a com­pre­hen­si­ve source of infor­ma­ti­on for pro­fes­sio­nals in polar sci­ence who may use it for logi­stic and field works plan­ning. It could be also recom­men­ded to uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents of geo­lo­gy, bio­lo­gy, and eco­lo­gy of polar regi­ons,…”

The full review is published here: Bar­ták, M. (2013): R. Stan­ge (2012): Spits­ber­gen / Sval­bard. A com­ple­te gui­de around the Arc­tic archi­pe­la­go. Book Review. Czech Polar Reports, 3: 78 – 79.