Only her headlamps donated light to the geobiologist James Bradley and the microbiologist Catherine Larose in this photo when the two archipelago in the Arctic Sea dealt in the darkness on the Norway, which belongs to Norway. The research team had inevitably inserted a night shift here, because at the time of the admission in December 2020, the polar night was on Spitzbergen. Between mid -November and the end of January, the sun is at least six degrees below the horizon – it remains pitcher around the clock.
On the photo otherwise only in blue and gray tones, the view quickly walks to the bright orange milling mills of the core drill. Bradley and Larose drilled into the ice. You can see how to pack the precious ice cream pencil in a plastic bag. The biologists wanted to examine how microbes and other life forms survive in the ice and adapt to the darkness and cold of the polar night.
The photo has taken the freelance research technician Dagmara Wojanowicz, which worked primarily for the Norwegian Polar Institute, with Bradley and Larose during the field work. With her picture she won this year’s “Scientist at Work” photo competition from the journal “Nature”. For this purpose, researching photos of their field work send “the diverse, interesting, challenging, impressive and colorful work of scientists around the world”. This year the Nature jury selected six winners from over 200 entries.