The International Kongsfjorden year 2024-2025

The International Kongsfjorden Year (IKY) is a research initiative developed within Ny-Ålesund’s Kongsfjorden System Flagship. Its goal is an international campaign to collect year-round, high-resolution, multidisciplinary data on core parameters of the marine ecosystem in Kongsfjorden.

The IKY field work will take place from August 2024 to August 2025, and will be achieved by collaboration between projects funded by third-parties as well as by internal funding of institutions active in Ny-Ålesund.

Activites in the IKY year is plotted in the illustration below. Also read the column to the right to get more information about responsible institutuions and PIs for the various parts of the IKY →

Do you have projects in Kongsfjorden that you want to be included in the IKY initiative? Please contact the Kongsfjorden System Flagship chairs Clara Hoppe (Clara.Hoppe@awi.de) and Allison Bailey (allison.bailey@npolar.no).

Read more about the Kongsfjorden System Flagship here. Check also out the CTD-protal developed within the Flagship!

Core projects in IKY

Weekly sampling at Kb3:

The backbone of the year will be sampling every week mid fjord at the reference station called Kb3. This sampling is carried out by the project YESSS – Year-round EcoSystem Study on Svalbard: Seasonally resolving ecosystem functioning in a warming Arctic. PI is Clara Hoppe at The Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI). The project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, where AWI has seven other partner insitutions in the project. The weekly sampling at Kb3 will also include microbial (prokaryotic) measurements carried out by scientists at India’s NCPOR and Lehigh University in the US.

Seasonal transects

The Norwegian Polar Institute will contribute with seasonal transects, which is part of the Long term seasonal pelagic montioring program in Kongsfjorden. PI is Allison Bailey at NPI. Read more about plankton trends in Kongsfjorden here. NCPOR, India will also contribute to the hydrography survey of the Kongsfjorden transect roughly on a biweekly timescale throughout the IKY period (PI Divya David T).

Fjord to shelf transects

The Institute of Oceanology at the Polish Academy of Sciences (IO PAN) will contribute with summer transects from Kongsfjorden to the Fram strait in 2024 and 2025. PI is Sławomir Kwaśniewski.

Data from moorings in Kongsfjorden

Data to support the sampling results in IKY will be obtained from the year round moorings in Kongsfjorden. Moorings are owned by these institutions:

• The Arctic University in Norway – UiT, PI is Malin Daase and Jørgen Berge. Read more about their mooring here.
• The Institute of Polar Sciences in the Italian National Research Council, PI is Leonardo Langone). Read more about their mooring here.
• SIOS-funded „ExFoBB“ project (jointly run by NPI, UiT and AWI).

Also, a subsurface ocean mooring with physical, biogeochemical, and ambient noise measurement sensors will be deployed in Kongsfjorden in August 2024 by NCPOR (PI Divya David T.).

Additional projects can be integrated into IKY at a later stage, please contact the Flaghsip chairs for more information!