Project Leader: Fra NGU: Knut Stalsberg
Project duration: 01. January 2007 - 31. December 2009
Monitoring, dating and modelling climate change effects on high arctic mountain slope processes and their impact on traffic.
Cryoslope Svalbard will study how cold mountain slopes in Svalbard will respond to future projected climatic changes. Secondly how these potential changes could affect the traffic on the roads in the Longyearbyen settlement and the surrounding highly used winter roads connecting the settlements and tourist attractions in Nordenskiöld Land.
The study will be a combination of systematic observations of slope processes, measurements of meteorological parameters on the slopes, as well as past geological and geomorp hological studies of slope process activity together with meteorological data available since 1912.
We will study the 40 km most used summer and winter roads in three steep terrain areas in and around Longyearbyen, where avalanches occur every winter caus ing problems for the traffic.