Time to present the participants of the IKKA expedition 2025 heading to Ikka Fjord in SW Greenland in June 2025. We are six scientists this year plus Kunuk Albrechtsen from Arsuk aiding us again. There will be three different research projects covered this year of......

Great news! We finally managed to get the article published that covers the work that Sigríður María Aðalsteinsdóttir (Sigga) did for her MSc thesis at the University of Iceland. She joined us on fieldwork to Greenland in 2019 and sampled rocks from the Grønnedal-Íka alkaline......

Our Ikkaton – Climate Solutions project (https://ikkaton.com), led by CEO Erik Trampe, has made it into this really excellent article by Kalundborg Harbour (in Danish): https://portofkalundborg.dk/groen-innovation-paa-kalundborg-havn-ny-teknologi-omdanner-co2-til-kalk/ Kalundborg harbour in Denmark is the location of the pilot plant, where CO2 gas is turned into the mineral......

Photo above: Erik Sturkell ‘shadow selfie’ from his beloved Iceland and one of his favoured volcanoes Askja 🙂 Erik has reached an impressive number of 50 published articles in the Swedish journal ‘Geologiskt forum’ published by the Geological Society of Sweden: https://geologiskaforeningen.se/geologiskt_forum/ He had his......

Text and photos by Erik Sturkell In late October (20 Oct.) I traveled east to Åbo in Finland to give a two weeklong intensive course in geophysics. This was the tenth time I gave this course (first time in 2011), and its popularity has steadily......

We have a new publication in Nature Communications Earth & Environment on a method towards forecasting earthquakes in Iceland: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01852-3. This is a huge step forward in science if this method can be applied elsewhere in high-risk areas of earthquakes above magnitude 5. So far......

One week was spent in Jämtland, Northern Sweden in end of September in search of further evidence of a third meteorite crater in the Lockne – Tandsbyn area. This is a continuation of the field campaign that Erik and I started last autumn, and where......

Photo above: Florian Huber, SUBMARIS. River running into Ikka Fjord with musk oxen on the beach, 2021 Over 27 years, we have been collecting water samples from Ikka Fjord in SW Greenland on various expeditions between 1995 and 2022. These encompass samples of springs, rivers,......

What a fantastic conference! Probably one of the most interesting I’ve ever attended. The European Mineralogical Conference 2024 was held at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland in the third week of August. I went there as a convener and presenter on the carbonate session but......

Text and photos by Erik Sturkell On the last day in July, I traveled to Iceland for carrying out fieldwork around the Askja volcano. This volcano has inflated since August 2021 with nearly 70 cm until late summer 2023. The continues GPS stations indicate that......

The Nordic Volcanological Center (NordVulk) in Iceland can celebrate its 50th anniversary this year. Yet, at the same time year 2024 marks the end of NordVulk as we have known it these past 50 years. The funding from the Nordic Council has come to an......

Exciting times ahead with the launching of a new CCUS (Carbon Capture, Utilisation, and Storage) company led by CEO Erik Trampe (see featured photo) – a colleague from the IKKA-project. Inspired by the natural processes of Ikka Fjord, we hope to make a difference and......

I’m really happy to report that we got 11 team members home safely, and that the ikaite columns of Ikka Fjord appear to have recovered remarkably in the last couple of years. In certain areas of the fjord, they are teeming with life just like......

We are really grateful for being granted a third year of funding to our NAPA project ‘The Ikaite columns – past and future, and prospects in a changing Arctic 2022 – 2025’. The third year marks the final activities of this project that started in......

Erik is currently in Iceland to take part in the annual glacier trip to Vatnajökull (Vorferð) with JÖRFÍ. However, he was extremely lucky to even see the onset of the most recent volcanic eruption on the Reykjanes peninsula. He was taking part in the weekly......

Thanks to new funding from the Aage V. Jensens Fond in Denmark, we are now able to invite our two German divers, Uli Kunz and Florian Huber to join us again on fieldwork in Ikka Fjord, SW Greenland. They were part of a film crew......

Congrats to Mariane Schmidt Thøgersen and co-workers on their new Ikka publication on the incredible biodiversity found inside the ikaite columns of Ikka Fjord in SW Greenland: Thøgersen MS, Zervas A, Stougaard P and Ellegaard-Jensen L (2024) Investigating eukaryotic and prokaryotic diversity and functional potential......

Featured photo showing Mark Peternell setting up new ikaite experiments in the IceLab at Natrium, University of Gothenburg (Photo: Gabrielle Stockmann). After having worked as a guest researcher for a while at the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Gothenburg, I felt it was about......

I attended a very interesting and well organised conference in Copenhagen last week: ‘The Changing Arctic Conference’ (link here) with focus on security, environment, and society. Back in the old days when I worked at the Danish Polar Center, we used to have an annual......

Text and photos by Erik Sturkell On the 19th of February I traveled to Iceland to spend a week. There were a lot of things to attend both big and small. I had hopes high to be able to visit Grindavík and to see the new......

Gothenburg hosted the 36th Nordic Geological Winter Meeting (NGWM 2024) 50 years after the very first NGWM meeting, which happened to take place in Gothenburg, too. Hence in many ways a jubilee meeting. Here afterwards, we are extremely relieved to see how well everything was......

For the first time since the covid-19 pandemic, the AGU Fall Meeting was back in San Francisco and so were we. Last time we were here was in 2019, just before everything got closed down by covid restrictions. You could clearly tell that San Francisco......

Text by Erik Sturkell By December 2023, I reached the number 100 of peer-reviewed articles that I’m either first author or co-author on. My first research article was published in 1990 in the Soviet journal Okeanologija AN SSSR and published in Russian. It reported the......

Text and photos by Erik Sturkell One week in November was spent working with my impact colleague Jens Ormö in Madrid, Spain. I arrived on the evening of November 19 and took a taxi to the hotel. The hotel was conveniently located near the airport......

Lina Rasmusson, Susse Wegeberg and I participated in the Greenland Science Week in Nuuk, Greenland. Here Lina presented the results of the first year of our NAPA-funded IKKA-project “The Ikaite columns – past and future, and prospects in a changing Arctic”. Focus of Lina’s talk......