Zofia Stachowska is one of the beneficiaries of the competition for funding student and PhD candidates mobility within the HarSval project. She received 10000 PLN funding for the research trip: Laboratory – tracing Holocene paleoenvironmental changes and their dynamics in Central Spitsbergen lake record, University of Bergen.

Enjoy reading her report below:

“In September 2024, I visited the EARTHLAB at the Department of Earth Science at the University of Bergen in Norway. This month-long mobility was part of the HarSval project, aimed at strengthening research collaboration between Polish and Norwegian institutions,

My PhD project seeks to fingerprint eolian processes in Holocene lake sediment sequences from Arctic lakes.  This research, as part of the National Science Centre (NCN) ASPIRE project (led by Matt Strzelecki and Willem van der Bilt), combines Polish expertise in coastal geomorphology with Norwegian specialization in sedimentology and paleoenvironmental studies. Since November 2023, I have been working on sediments from a small lake in Gipsdalen on Central Spitsbergen, which receives wind-blown dust from nearby glacier systems. The University of Bergen’s state-of-the-art Earth Surface Sediment Laboratory (EARTHLAB) and collaboration with Dr. Willem van der Bilt, provide the ideal environment to advance this research, allowing to produce high-resolution paleoclimate data. During the mobility stay, together with Dr. van der Bilt, we completed labwork necessary to publish the second paper of my PhD project. Specifically, we 1) improved the chronological framework for the record, by extracting more material for radiocarbon dating, and 2) deepened our understanding about the link between sediment sources, surface processes, and the elemental composition of the investigated core  As a result, we hope to reveal how changes in minerogenic input and local environmental factors have shaped the study site over the last seven millennia.”