Today’s breakfast: Macro zooplankton and solar protons on waffles

In the morning of 9th of November, 49 UNIS students gathered in Møysalen to participate in this autumn’s unisBREAKFAST. Provided with sandwiches, waffles, and fruits, we were given two engaging talks from PhD students of the Arctic Biology and Arctic Geoscience department.

Photo: Samira Terzenbach

Robynne Nowicki took us with her into the Arctic ocean on a mission of labeling shrimp with nutrient fact sheets. Her talk “Quantifying energetic variation in Barents Sea macro-zooplankton” gave an insight into her tasks onboard of scientific cruises and showed her results on the seasonal variation in nutrient content of different macro-zooplankton species.

Lotte van Hazendonk set off with us into space, presenting the findings from her Master’s thesis on solar proton flux mitigation by the Earth’s magnetic field. In her talk “Cutoff latitudes measured by GPS satellites” she introduced us to L shells, magnetic latitudes, and solar energetic particle events.

Photo: Samira Terzenbach

Both talks were followed by a range of interesting questions from the audience which was mainly composed of Bachelor (64 %) and Master (27 %), but also had some PhD (14 %) students among it.
The majority of listeners came from the Geophysics (41 %) and Geology (39 %) department, while only 18 % were biologists. No wonder, that the wish for more geology content was raised. So that might be on the agenda for next term’s unisBREAKFAST! Other than juice and milk, the event seemed to have left nothing to be desired and we, as the organizers, received a very positive feedback. It was great, to have a multidisciplinary gathering in such a friendly atmosphere. A big thanks again to our speakers and a curious audience!

Your bioCEED and iEARTH student representatives.