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Mr. Einar Sveinbjörnsson, meteorologist at the Icelandic Meteorological Office keeps a very interesting ‘weather blog’. Every day he writes about his observations of weather phenomena all over the world. This morning he drew attention to the fact that sattelite pictures are showing very little sea ice along the east coast of Greenland.

Icelanders go crazy on new years eve burning fireworks like it´s not just the last day of the year, but also the last day of their lifes.

Borea Adventues is in a Christmas mood and now giving 10% discount on all bookings made and confirmed before February 16th 2007. On the two experimental expeditions, to Jan Mayen and Greenland, the discount offered is 20%. We had to make a few adjustments to prices for coming season and this discount will do more than offset any price increase. The Icelandic currency can be kind of unstable but with these adjustments we will be locking the price list in Euro’s until a new schedule for 2008 is posted.

Today is the Day of Saint Thorlak. It´s a long tradition in the West Fjords of Iceland to eat stinky skate fish on that day (don´t ask me why!) and during the last decade or so, this tradition has spread all over the country. The skate fish is put in a large container for some period until the ammonia smell becomes worse than in a lousy bar toilet on a Sunday morning. Yummi…

We heard from our friend Jim Gudjonson in Golden, British Columbia that he is enjoying great snow conditions in his mountains. A week of snow cat skiing in the Monashee Mountains in 80 cm of powder….. sounds awesome! Jim was skiing with us last spring and is bringing another group for May 2007. We don’t have 80cm of powder in Isafjordur now but today was absolutely beautiful day – cold, clear and yes… with perhaps 15-20cm of powder.

Date presented at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting suggests that Arctic sea ice is no longer recovering from the summer melt and that the ice pack may show very rapid losses in the near future. Calculations show that late summer in the Arctic will be ice-free by 2040 or earlier, well within a lifetime.

Here is a puzzle… find the hidden Ptarmigan couple in their winter dress? During a short hike in the mountain above Isafjordur last Sunday afternoon the Aurora skipper came across this Ptarmican couple. They were happily oblivious to the fact that Ptarmigans are one of the most popular Christmas dinner in Iceland… or perhaps they simply knew that this guy never carries a more dangerous weapon than a camera.

“Drinking water from the falls, eating berries from the vine – that’s the way it should be! A great land inhabited by great people. To the best crew and compliments to the chef! Thank you all !!” Enough talk about snow and gale force winds… when the days are dark it’s nice to remind us of summer and fair weather. Above is a quote from AURORA’s guestbook, written by Erik Butler from San Francisco. He is a great photographer and many of the pictures on this website are from his collection from a trip last July.

This month of November has been quite windy. We have had a constant stream of lows coming up from south of Greenland. The strongest gusts of wind recorded were 68 m/s on the SE coast of Iceland. This is over 130 knots! On November 5th we had gusts of 54 m/s (105 knots) on an official weather station at the Isafjordur Ski Area.

Only a few weeks ago we were praying for the snow to arrive in Isafjordur. And after an unusually mild fall winter has come with full force. Last few days have seen a constant chain of low pressures coming over from Newfoundland and south of Greenland. These have brought a tongue of very cold air from Greenland and we have seen temperatures down to -10 degrees celcius along the coast and even lower temperatures in the mountains.