January 2014. Research vessel “Helmer Hanssen” in Longyearbyen January 6 ready for the first CarbonBridge cruise (Picture: Lena Seuthe, UiT)

January 2014. Full moon over the snow covered mountains of Spitsbergen (picture: Lena Seuthe, UiT)

January 2014. Zooplankton sampling in the polar night (picture: Rudi Caeyers, UiT)

January 2014. The zooplankton catch (picture: Rudi Caeyers, UiT)

January 2014. Catching marine microbes for DNA analysis (picture: Rudi Caeyers, UiT)

January 2014. Filling bottles for community respiration measurements (picture: Rudi Caeyers, UiT)

January 2014. Measuring oxygen in a water sample (picture: Rudi Caeyers, UiT)

January 2014. Light colouration on the filter after filtration of 1L seawater (picture: Rudi Caeyers, UiT)

January 2014. Extracting chlorophyll a as an indicator for phytoplankton biomass (picture: Rudi Caeyers, UiT)

January 2014. Preserving samples in liquid nitrogen (picture: Rudi Caeyers, UiT)

May 2014. Tons of equipment are loaded onto RV Helmer Hanssen in Longyearbyen before the second CarbonBridge cruise (picture: Maria Lund Paulsen, UiB)

May 2014. CarbonBridge meets the ice just north of Kongsfjorden at the western side of Spitsbergen. There is no way for RV Helmer Hanssen to reach CarbonBridges study area north of Svalbard (picture: Evy Foss Skjoldal, UiB)

May 2014. Curious visitor while CarbonBridge scientists perform turbulence measurements from the sea ice (pictures: Birgit Nesheim and Arild Sundfjord, NPI)

May 2014. In the control room the first CTD profiles are awaited (picture: Evy Foss Skjoldal, UiB)

May 2014. A typical CTD profile for the region: the water column northwest of Spitsbergen is strongly stratified with a cold and fresh water layer at the surface overlaying warm and saline Atlantic water. (picture: Evy Foss Skjoldal, UiB)

May 2014. Its’ many hundreds of liter of seawater that are filtered for genetic analysis of the plankton community at the process station (picture: Evy Foss Skjoldal, UiB)

June 2014. The CarbonBridge team visits the Polish resaerch station in Hornsund (Spitsbergen) after successfully completed fieldwork

August 2014. The CarbonBridge team is gathering back on RV Helmer Hanssen to discuss the details of it’s third field campaign (picture: Mattias Cape, Scripps)

August 2014. Preperation of on-deck incubators to measure growth and metabolic rates of different plankton groups under close to in-situ light and temperature conditions.(picture: Mattias Cape, Scripps)

August 2014. Retrieval of bottles for primary production measurements after 24h incubation at different depths in the sea (picture: Mattias Cape, Scripps)

August 2014. A rig of  sediment traps is retrieved after having been floating freely in the sea for one day. The sediment traps collected sinking particles at different depths (picture: Mattias Cape, Scripps)