Creativity, innovation and isolation

When I was teaching our evening course on human evolution some years ago, the issue of creativity and innovation came up. How come that small and isolated communities still use their stone tools, bows and arrows, while large and connected populations managed an industrial and cyber revolution and developed advanced tools (good and bad ones)? It obviously needs a critical mass of minds to push things forward, to think innovative and to become creative.

Being in Southeast Asia, and especially here in Singapore, I am every day surrounded by hundreds or thousands of people, I see all the many students, and I get a strong feeling of dynamics and innovation. I could write a blog every other minute, because of all the new impressions I get, the many people I meet, the discussions I am having, and the thoughts that pop up in my mind. So yes, being surrounded by many does make me creative!

But – this renewed creativity partly resides in my different background as I see things from a different angle, judge with different eyes and look at things from the outside. So probably to being creative it is important to sit on the fence having one foot on one side and the other on the other side; see both sides, learn from both sides, meet different cultures, opinions, and ways of doing and merge this into something new. My creativity (and probably that of many others) clearly declines or turns into something very different when I draw myself back, isolate myself and become overly self-centered for a longer time period.

There is however also another angle to creativity and that is being able to think free, to grow up in an open-minded and equal society, where everyone has the possibility to develop and to learn, and where bottom-up is more important than top-down.

I am angry

I know that I should not be angry and upset! Life is just good.

One of my PhD students will soon see his Nature Communications paper online. I am in Singapore, enjoying the tropical warmth and I am on a sabbatical and guest professor at the Earth Observatory. Yesterday I spent an interesting day at the Singapore – Sweden Excellence Seminar, which is co-organized by several major universities in Sweden and Singapore to promote joint research; I listened to inspiring talks; enjoyed a good dinner at the same table as the famous Swedish astronaut Christer Fuglesang; and I got the good news that our research application to the Swedish Research Council was granted for the next four years.

Why am I then angry? Because I did not get all the money I had applied for? Because I am only second on the list of 358 persons within Natural and Engineering Sciences in terms of how much money I got for the next four years?

I am angry because so many other (and especially young) researchers, who had put weeks into writing their proposals did not get funding. I am angry because I am the only person in my department who got funding. I am angry because less and less money goes to basic (fundamental) research. I am angry about how research money is distributed.

I am deeply worried about the future of basic research in geosciences. I am deeply worried about the scientific career prospects of our young faculty, who can of course not compete with senior scientists who have been able to publish more than hundred papers, who have an high H-index, supervise many students and postdocs and through this get their minimum of five papers a year (usually many more).

The present situation, where the rich get richer, where the government and the funding agencies dictate what type of research is relevant (by creating strategic research topics), where scientific super excellence (who defines what is excellent!?) and H-index (I need another blog to comment on this!) rule, and where the science careers of many are at stake, is not sustainable. Not for science, not for the universities, not for society and not for Sweden.

This is why I am angry.

Talking about exchange

The people here at the Earth Observatory, who are responsible for the undergraduate education in the Asian School of the Environment, would like to start a regular exchange of students. This week we continued our discussions and I explained a bit more about our university structure, the academic year, course credits, and the different courses that are available within our section of Earth and Environmental Sciences (web page unfortunately only in Swedish). And of course I mentioned the field stations in Tarfala, Askö and Navarino, where some of our field courses are given and which would be really exotic places for Singapore students.

This week I will also meet undergraduate students and will tell them about the different departments, which form part of Earth and Environmental Sciences at SU, about our BSc and MSc courses and our education system, and what it might be like to be an exchange student in Stockholm. And next week I will tell a similar story to the people here at the Earth Observatory and the Asian School of the Environment, however this time with a focus on the science that is carried out at our departments in Stockholm and at the Bolin Centre for Climate Research.

Maybe in the future we will be able to exchange students, and maybe some researchers will find common interests. For sure, among the overarching themes of natural hazards, climate change, and pollution, several topics of joint interest may be found.

Grey versus black hair

When in Asia I always feel really really old. Why? Because there is almost no one with grey hair, except maybe some really really old people. I am often basically the only one who has (pretty many) streaks of grey hair and yet some of the people with completely black hair must be so much older than I am.

The other day, when I walked around in several huge shopping centers I encountered maybe two or three persons with grey hair. Yet I must have passed hundreds of people, children, women, men, young, middle-aged and old. And today I saw an interview with a 86 year old man on TV and even he had black hair (although the tint was slightly towards reddish).

How do all the millions of people here manage to keep their black hair? Is it the healthy food and/or the good living conditions? Or, is the secret behind all the black hair maybe hidden in the tons of black hair color that are sold everywhere? Pretty likely it is the hair color, why otherwise would a 86 year old have black (reddish) hair?

Hokkaido cup cake making

Campus Recreation and Wellness (CReW) here at NTU regularly organizes events and activities for staff members and their families, in the new Club House. Unfortunately several of the courses had already started when I arrived and it was thus not possible to join these. But I found one, a two-hour course on Hokkaido Cup Cake Making, which sounded exotic enough, and which still had space.

Having never ever attended a cooking or baking class, this was an absolute premier for me. About 30 people (mainly women) were at the short two-hour workshop. The teacher had already prepared everything, and on each table were the instructions, bowls and spoons, a balance, the exact amount of sugar and flour in small plastic bags, and plastic aprons. She then started to go through the process of cup cake making in very great detail, from how to whip egg white and cream, to how to mix the dough and how to place the dough into small cup cakes. I don’t think she forgot the slightest detail. Although I felt a bit impatient by her 30 min lecture and wanted to get started, I actually did learn quite a bit!

My fellow cup cake bakers, three women, thought that I was pretty clumsy and were watching me carefully when I tried to separate the egg white from the egg yolk. This made me pretty nervous and of course I dropped some of the yolk into the egg white! Not good at all! “You messed it up”! Although I managed to get the yolk out again, my clumsiness showed them that I really was a beginner here. From now on they watched every step I made, and told me what and how I should do. Being a fairly independent person, this was tough!

But in the very end the cup cake dough ended up in the cup cake forms, was placed on a tray in line with a certain number (under the eyes of my fellow cup cake makers to make sure that I don’t mess up the numbers), and was baked in the oven. The result was fine for me and I was happy to see that the dough had lifted at all, but “not good” said the teacher, when she saw my cup cakes, “you were not gentle enough and not quick enough when you stirred the dough”. Chinese are right to the point and absolutely not afraid of criticizing!

Cup cake making was not only a lesson in cup cake making (without baking powder, only super fresh eggs!), but also an interesting cultural meeting!

Compact living

It always strikes me how extremely densely populated parts of SE Asia are and how many millions of people live here. Bangkok’s population is for example estimated at 8.5 million people and all of Thailand has 67 million inhabitants. The city state of Singapore has 5.5 million people, which is about half of Sweden’s population (Sweden’s whole population is 9.6 million people). But Singapore’s size of 720 km² is tiny compared to the size of Sweden (449,964 km²)!

Singapore’s size may be compared to some of Sweden’s smallest provinces, but even these have an area that doubles the size of Singapore. Gotland has a size of 3,183 km², Blekinge of 3,055 km², and little Öland with 1,342 km² is double the size of Singapore.

If one would place everyone, who is living in Sweden, on the island of Öland, then we would approach compact living as in Singapore. Of course one would need to build a few high rises to accommodate everyone since one third of Öland would still need to be made up of green spaces with parks and gardens, as it is in Singapore. So, my conclusion is that there is loads of space in the whole of Sweden to be filled until it approaches compact living as here in Singapore.

Picture courtesy: Wikipedia
Uploaded by chensiyuan, February 2012.

Hammock and palm tree?

My four-year old grandson thought being in the tropics would mean lying in a hammock under a palm tree. Singapore is in the tropics, and there are palm trees, but so far I have not seen a single hammock.

Instead I am sitting in a very nice office with air condition (sometimes it is freezing cold) and am discussing exchange possibilities for undergraduate students between the Asian School of the Environment and Earth and Environmental Sciences at Stockholm University. The idea is to facilitate the exchange of students (and researchers) by providing clear guidelines as to which courses can be taken, which of the courses are in English, and how much credits each of the courses corresponds to. And of course having a contact person at each university, who can help and guide the students.

Spending some time here in Singapore would be a fantastic experience for our students, who could join excursions to for example Bali or Sumatra, who would learn much more about the geology and environmental changes in this part of the world and who could do small project works related to a variety of subjects. And Stockholm University, and Sweden as a whole would be a great experience for Singapore students, who have never seen snow and ice, or done fieldwork in a country that far north. Taking the students to Utö or a bit farther away to places where we currently have excursions to (Iceland, Islay, Greece) would certainly be a life experience!

Next week we will go on with our discussion and given the enthusiastic director of the Asian School of the Environment, Charles Rubin, I am sure that we will get a fruitful exchange going!

NTU Campus for foodies

Before I came to NTU, I thought I would cook my own food in the evenings and when I had arrived I was a bit disappointed to not find a real stove in the kitchen, but just a heating plate, a toaster and a microwave oven. Nothing really to cook the food I had had in mind, and the small store on campus did not either have the choice of produce that I had hoped to find. But then I soon realized that it is no point to cook food when it is so much easier to pass by one of the many food stalls and get a delicious Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean or Malay take away! So now my greatest difficulties are to decide what to choose: Do I want some delicious Malay beef today, shall I go for the Indian vegetarian dishes or the mutton curry, choose a Korean bibimbap, or take some Chinese dumplings?

The food in the university canteen’s is surprisingly cheap. A big lunch may cost around 4-6 Singapore Dollars, which translates into not more than 24-36 SEK. It would be extremely difficult to find lunch for such a price and such a quality on Stockholm University’s campus! Maybe Stockholm University should open up an area with food stalls and invite a variety of small restaurants to serve Indian, Chinese, Lebanese, Japanese, Italian, ……. dishes? What a difference this would make compared to the boring and often tasteless choices that are around?

The lunch places in the canteens open around 10 am and serve food until around 6 or 7 pm. For dinner there are other options in a student/staff canteen and if one wants to eat in a more posh style, there is the university club house. I prefer the canteen, which is always full of students and families, who sit and eat there, sharing the many dishes they have on the table, while the small children watch movies on an Ipad. The choices in the evening canteen are not as wide as for lunch, but the many Malay, Korean and Chinese dishes all look and taste delicious.

Today and yesterday I had Indian food for lunch, and Chicken curry and Chinese dumplings for dinner. What will be my choices for tomorrow? Maybe Malay or Vietnamese food, or some Chinese duck? Certainly one never goes hungry here on campus!

Forest fires – dangerous haze and carbon dioxide

During the last two days PSI* readings were really high, reaching the unhealthy to very unhealthy range. But today conditions were much better and I could for the first time see patches of blue sky. When conditions are very hazy the sky is grey and the distant high rises are are only barely visible.

Being here in Singapore is however nothing compared to Kalimantan, where forest fires have been burning for several months and where the air is thick with hazardous haze. Kalimantan has huge peatland areas (see article for describing the problems) and of these 78% are actually owned by private companies. Since large parts of the peatlands have been drained, they are dry and fires easily spread. A total of 1.7 million hectares are now burning and there does not seem an end to the fires. This year’s fires have already released more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than the whole of Germany in one year. Fires are also burning all over Sumatra and it is mainly the smoke from these fires, which reaches Singapore.

The Washington Post writes that the 2015 Indonesian fire season has so far featured a stunning 94,192 fires. Those emissions are more than large enough to have global consequences. Indeed, according to recent calculations by Guido van der Werf, a researcher at VU University Amsterdam in the Netherlands who keeps a database that tracks the global emissions from wildfires, this year’s Indonesian fires had given off an estimated 995 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions as of Oct. 14.That’s just shy of a billion metric tons, or a gigaton. The number is an estimate, of course, and subject to “substantial uncertainties” — but it’s also based on a well-developed methodology for estimating wildfire emissions to the atmosphere based upon satellite images of the fires themselves and the vegetation they consume. “Fire emissions are already higher than Germany’s total CO2 emissions, and the fire season is not over yet,” says van der Werf.

Forest fires occur each year in Indonesia, but this year’s fires are the most extensive producing long-lasting haze. I experienced forest fires in spring this year in northern Thailand. But these fires were small and localized, and controlled by fire walls, so that they would not spread. Still the smoke was so thick that airplanes could no longer start and land and breathing was really difficult. Just imagine how it must feel for all the people living on Sumatra and Kalimantan who are enveloped in this smoke full of dangerous substances!

*The Pollutant Standard Index (PSI) reflects a total of six pollutants – sulphur dioxide (SO2), particulate matter (PM10) and fine particulate matter (PM2.5), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), carbon monoxide (CO) and ozone (O3).

My walk to and from work

The sun has been shining during the last days and haze warnings have classified the situation as less unhealthy. Sun and better visibility place the campus in a much better light! On the down side of the coin is that it feels much hotter and much more humid. But since the daily walk from the apartment to the Earth Observatory takes only 5-10 minutes, it is not too bad. And in case I don’t want to walk, there is always the campus bus, which continuously tours the campus. What a difference to my almost daily walks to the subway station in Bangkok!

On my return today, the campus zoo was alive and the wild boars roamed around on the lawn outside the student apartments in daylight. I guess they find food there, although signs strongly advise against feeding them. The other day I found a small bat outside my door, crickets are singing and birds are everywhere. The only thing that is missing are mosquitoes and I am most grateful for that. Living in a tropical climate without having to bother about these annoying insects is actually great and amazing. Having battled mosquitoes for several months in Thailand, I am happy that they don’t appear here!

What’s in the news in SE Asia?

When I am in Southeast Asia, it always strikes me how far away and how small Europe is, and how little Europe dominates the daily news. Presently the most important (and probably only) European news relate to the current refugee situation.

SE Asian news are dominated by the enormous forest fires on Sumatra and Kalimantan, which are extremely difficult to control and will take weeks, if not months to extinguish. Several countries are now helping Indonesia to fight the fires, still there is no ending insight. Smoke from these fires blows into Singapore, where pollution levels were today again in the unhealthy range. If it is unhealthy to do physical exercises here, one can only imagine how the situation is on Sumatra and Kalimantan for those who live there, who have to inhale the dangerous smoke, and who have not seen the sun for weeks on end. Prognoses for a really strong El Nino event, which brings drought to SE Asia, do not make the situation for the coming weeks/months much brighter.

China’s dominance in the South China Sea are another recurrent news feature. China has been accused of occupying strategic islands, which are also claimed by other nations, such as for example the Philippines and Vietnam. Although much information about the so-called South China Sea Conundrum is being written, a good book to get an overview on the problem is Robert D. Kaplan’s book Asia’s Cauldron – The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific. I read this book earlier this year and can recommend it.

The upcoming elections in Myanmar are another of the top news. It will be the first time that Myanmar citizens can vote for a democratic government. Aung San Suu Kyi visited Rakhine State recently, a region where most of the Rohingya minorities live and where a few years ago fierce clashes took place between Muslim Rohingya and Buddhist Burmese. Aung San Suu Kyi was of course immediately accused for siding with the Muslim minority. However, the Rohingyas are not even allowed to vote, because they are not regarded as Myanmar citizens, thus they will have little chance of being represented in the new regional government. Earlier this year Myanmar had passed a law allowing the more than one million Rohingyas to vote, but after protest storms, the government revoked the right to vote again. Because of their difficult situation in Myanmar many Rohingya have been and are fleeing from Myanmar and try to relocate to Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.

I really liked what Ang San Suu Kyi said during her visit to Rakhine State: “Religion and ethnicity are not the same”. Maybe one should also add the often used term ‘culture’. Thus, culture, ethnicity and religion are not the same, and neither culture or ethnicity should be confounded with religion. And on a very personal note, I think that religion and religious beliefs should remain each person’s personal issue and that religion must in no way be imposed on other people or made part of a political system. Many religions are interpreted by men, who take their liberty and status to decide what is good or bad for women. How different would the world look if it were women who would interpret the so-called wise words written down in religious books? My guess is that the world would be more peaceful than what it currently is.

Toba eruption ash on campus?

The Toba eruption, which occurred about 74,000 years ago, at the site of Lake Toba on Sumatra, Indonesia, spread its ash over wide areas in Southeast Asia and is an important marker horizon in many paleo archives.

Caroline Bouvier, one of the researchers at the Earth Observatory, just found a several meters thick ash layer in a construction pit on campus. To be sure that the ash really derives from the Toba eruption, she took samples for further analyses and dating. It will be really interesting to see if the ash can be attributed to the Toba mega eruption or if it is much younger. The 1-2 m thick ash layer in the construction pit could clearly be seen based on its whitish color, which distinguished from the upper and lower layers.

Wikipedia has quite some information about the Toba eruption, in case someone wants to read up. However there are a number of really big mistakes in the text, such as for example that the eruption coincided with the start of the last glacial period. This is not correct, since the last glacial period started much earlier, around 115,000 years ago.

I would have liked to crawl around and study the sections much more, and especially the layers under- and overlying the ash. But we were not allowed to do that, because the people on the site told us that this would be too dangerous. Not sure if they ever saw risky geologists in action? But since it was so hot and humid, I did not insist too much and instead ended the small excursion with a coffee in a cool, air-conditioned place!

Meeting wild boar in Singapore

Living on the campus of Nanyang Technical University is pretty easy and convenient. Everything is basically within walking distance (10 minute walk to the Earth Observatory – EOS), although frequent free buses also tour the campus; different types of Asian food is available at many places and at a good price; shops provide basics; and there are many opportunities for physical activities, such as trails, a swimming pool, sports hall, tennis court, and so on.

The campus is as green as is possible in this densely populated country, with small wooded areas, extensive lawns, flowers, and hedges. It is actually so green that wild boars turn up after sun set and roam the lawns outside the student apartments. Signs warn that these pigs should not be fed and that one should be really careful when a mother pig has small piglets! So it is almost like Sweden, where wild boars freely roam the forests. The major difference between the wild boar here and in Sweden is that they are not eaten here! I tried my best to capture some of nightly visitors, but was not very successful as can be seen from these really blurred pictures!

Having loads of green spaces and frequent rains also means that mosquitoes thrive here. Many of these insects carry dengue, which causes symptoms that are similar to malaria, and not fun at all! Therefore it is really important to get rid of the mosquito breeding places as quick as possible. And this is what happened the other day: plumes of not so nice stuff was sprayed all around the student accommodation, where my apartment is. But – what is worse? Personally I prefer spraying to the risk of contracting dengue.

Study in Europe Fair in Singapore – October 10, 2015

Yesterday the European Union organized an information day about studying in Europe for prospective Singaporean students. Sweden was represented by the Swedish Embassy here in Singapore and by several volunteers, Singaporean and Swedish exchange students, and a visiting professor. The Swedish booth was well filled with cookies and information brochures from most Swedish universities.

I would have expected large crowds poring into the lecture halls and lining up in front of the booths, but had to realize that European universities do not hit as high as those in the USA and Australia. Nevertheless, there was some interest and the Swedish booth was kept busy by parents and potential students who wanted to know more about Sweden and the courses offered at the different universities.

Together with Heng, an alumni who had studied one semester in Stockholm and had just returned to Singapore, I represented Stockholm University. Sweden and Stockholm are so far away from here and such exotic places, but do attract attention with keywords such as “green, safe, gender equality, welfare and democracy”.

My 30 minute lecture “Make Stockholm University part of your future – study at Stockholm University” was attended by more people than the lecture given by the French (16:4)! Maybe we did attract one or two potential new students?!

Closer to the equator

A mere 12 hour flight separates Sweden from Singapore. Twelve hours is really not very long, just half a day! But coming from Sweden, where the fresh air already feels crispy in the mornings and the yellow leaves signal that autumn has arrived, to the heat, humidity and haze here in Singapore feels like worlds apart.

Singapore is a tropical country, located just one degree north of the equator, close to Malaysia and Indonesia, is and surrounded by the sea. Thus it is always very warm here (mean annual temperature 31 °C), always humid, and always rain; the vegetation is abundant and ever growing. Daily temperatures can range from a minimum of 23 to 26°C to a maximum of 31 to 34°C; humidity is between 90% in the early morning and around 60% in the afternoon, but can reach 100% during heavy and prolonged rain. Singapore does not have distinct wet or dry seasons – it rains all the time! However the months with highest rainfall are December and April, and those with less rainfall February and July.

Singapore’s different seasons are defined based on from where the wind blows:
December to early March is the North-East Monsoon Season, which means the wind blows from the northeast. Cloudy skies and frequent heavy rains mark the months of December and January, whereas it gets a bit drier in February and early March. Wind speeds can reach up to 30 to 40 km/h in January and February. The precursor to the South-West Monsoon between late March and May is characterized by early evening showers often with thunder and lighting and variable winds; and the South-West Monsoon Season between June and September sees scattered late morning and early afternoon showers. October and November are the months leading up to the North-East Monsoon. Winds are light and variable and scattered showers with thunder occur in the late afternoon and early evenings.

An interesting phenomenon are ‘Sumatras’ – lines of thunderstorms which usually occur between March and November. These develop at night over Sumatra or the Malacca Straits and move east towards Singapore and Peninsular Malaysia usually during the early morning.

Another interesting, yet much less fun phenomenon is haze. This year Singapore had extensive and long-lasting haze in September and early October. Haze is caused by suspension of very fine, dry particles in the air, which obscure the clarity of the sky, diminish visibility and decrease air quality. The air quality during the past month was so bad here, that it was almost impossible for people to be outside. The particles that make up the haze derive from large-scale forest fires in Indonesia and are transported by wind to neighboring regions. Forest clearance, which once was a small-scale farming method, has today become a tool of the palm oil industry to remove forest on a gigantic scale. So next time you wash your hair or eat chocolate, be aware that you contribute to the palm oil industry’s clearance of rain forests, to large scale haze pollution in Southeast Asia and to a reduction of endangered local wildlife!

Sources:
The National Environment Agency
Climate
Haze
Pollution measurements
The Straits Times
The Guardian

Reading up on Myanmar (Burma)

Asia Books is a chain of bookstores in Thailand with a good selection of books on Asian topics, books that are often difficult to find in Europe (even when searching on Amazon). I always look forward to browsing through the different sections because I know that I will likely find some new books.

Having read a number of books about Myanmar lately, among others several by Bertil Lintner, a Swedish journalist with an in depth knowledge on Burma, I now found two other excellent books about Myanmar: one by Andrew Marshall and one by Emma Larkin. These two books had been published already several years ago, but unfortunately I had never come across them.

In Finding George Orwell in Burma, Emma Larkin travels in the footsteps of George Orwell and tries to locate the places where he once lived and worked. Her excellent description of today’s Burma, her travel observations and her reflections on the past and present, coupled with flashbacks on Orwell’s life and personality make this book a real treasure trove.

Andrew Marshall also traces the footsteps of a person, who once lived in Burma, but who is much less well know to the public: Sir George Scott. The diary of this tough Victorian gentleman, who helped establish British colonial rule in Burma, guided Marshall to places which Scott explored, and where he once lived and worked. The Trouser People describes Burma’s colonial past and in an excellent way Burma’s cruel modern dictatorship.

Two other really good books, which vividly describe Burma’s past history and present are
The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma and Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia by Thant Myint-U. Both of these books make it also very clear how large China’s influence and interest has been and is in respect to Myanmar – despite the embargoes imposed by western countries.

Both books are easy to read and keep the reader fascinated from start to end. But – they also provoke strong emotions given the ugly colonial times and the seemingly never ending suffering of the Burmese people. I really recommend reading some of these books before setting out to admire Myanmar’s beautiful ancient temples.

Thailand for foodies

Most people love Thai food, although tourists generally want a milder, less spicy version of these delicious dishes. This often means that restaurants aimed for tourists only rarely serve good and authentic Thai food.

Eating is an important part of Thai live, although less time is now devoted to cooking, especially in Bangkok, where food can easily be bought from the local food stalls and where kitchens in the new condos are often too small to really cook. But when Thai families get together, food plays a central role and is always shared. At home or in a restaurant. Many prefer nowadays to go to restaurants, which have huge choices of different dishes (vegetable, meat, fish, rice, noodle, soup, and salads), instead of entertaining guests at home. This is because real Thai cooking takes a lot of time. To cater for a big family and to prepare the many different dishes means to first go to the market early in the morning to buy all the ingredients, then chopping the veggies, meat and fish, preparing the different curries and sauces, and finally cooking everything. Those you cook will however hardly have the time to sit down and enjoy the meal. Thus a restaurant visit is so much easier!

Food has also always played a central role during our fieldwork, and dinner was the pleasure of the day to look forward to, apart from the many sediment cores. And so were the many visits to the many markets with their food stalls and local delicacies.

More Thailand favorites

Bangkok is a huge city with a population equaling that of whole Sweden. Many parts of the city are dominated by high apartment buildings, which almost reach the sky. But there are also still parts of the city with lower apartment blocks, with ‘normal’ houses, many of which are surrounded by dense vegetation and high walls (especially in more upscale parts pf the city). And there are areas, where poor people live in slum-like conditions in cardboard houses: under a bridge or squeezed between highways, along a khlong or along the railway.

Bangkok has many touristic highlights and is a paradise for shopaholics with all its different malls and markets. My favorites are however not the malls or the general tourist attractions, but some rather low-key places, which I think still preserve some of the old Thailand, albeit mixed with more modern influences.

Prayer Textiles is such a place. It is located at Siam Square, close to one of the BTS exits. Tucked in between other houses it is a bit difficult to find. But once you have found it, you might spend hours looking at the fantastic textiles, the hand-woven and naturally dyed silk, and the selection of clothes that are for sale. Here, you can order our own specific silk dress, skirt, blouse, or what ever you wish.

The Thai House in Nonthaburi to the west of the city is another of my favorites. Here you can experience the Thai way of life, sleep in a house entirely build of teak wood, taste Pip’s excellent food, learn about all the veggies and plants that are healthy, and take cooking classes.

The Bangkok Tree House is located close to the Chao Phraya River, on the island of Bang Kra Jao, which is often called the green lung of Bangkok. Here you can sleep in the tree tops with a view on the river or Bangkok’s high rises, eat good food, watch the fire flies, and bike as much as you can. I have written earlier a <a href="“>post about biking on Bang Kra Jao and visiting the nice floating market there. Bang Kra Jao can easily be reached by local transport. This place is really not a place to miss when in Bangkok!

And (almost) finally, not to forget, my favorite foot massage at MOK. This place has no website, but can be found at the corner between Sukhumvit 22 and Soi Sai Nam Thip 2. The easiest way is to take a taxi either from BTS Asoke or from MRT Queen Sirikit. The foot reflex zone massage they offer for 300 THB/hour is the best I have ever had and well worth a detour.

Just round the corner from MOK is my favorite Hotel, the House by the Pond. There is absolutely nothing luxurious about this place, but it is a cozy retreat from hectic Bangkok, has a nice garden and the staff is wonderful.

Some of my Thailand favorites

I have probably spent almost 9 months in Thailand during the past seven years. Our road trips took us from north to south and from west to east, and apart from all the lakes we have visited, we also managed to see temples, national parks and many other nice places.

Thais are often really surprised when I tell them about all the places I have been to and very few visitors to Thailand know what I am talking about, because few explore Thailand beyond its islands and beaches. Yet there is so much more to see and experience! Here are some of my favorite spots, which are still off the beaten track:

For example beautiful Lake Kumphawapi in the northeast, where pink water lilies cover almost the whole lake during November and December. Watching these flowers from small boats has now become a tourist attraction and provides villagers with some income.

.

Also in the northeast and around Lakes Kumphawapi and Lake Pa Kho, some people produce salt by cooking the salt-rich soils in water and some make charcoal in clay ovens. These tasks have not yet become a tourist attraction, but maybe in a few years the villagers will realize that money can be made by showing all this to visitors?

When in the northeast of Thailand, why not visit the Sirindhorn (Phuwiang) Dinosaur Museum in Kalasin, where remains from dinosaurs that were excavated in the region are exhibited, together with many reconstructions. A perfect place for children. Further to the west is the large Nam Nao National Park, where one can set out searching for elephants, watch the gorgeous sunset, and sample local delicacies.

Chiang Mai with its many temples, Thailand’s highest mountain – Doi Inthanon, and the border region to Myanmar in Thailand’s northwest are really worth a visit. One can spend days there, walking, watching, eating, admiring!

Another of my many favorites is the historic town of Sukhothai, also in the northwest. Biking around is the best way to explore the old temples!

As to beaches and islands – there I do have some odd favorites: for example Kho Jum, a small island south of Krabi; Kho Tarutao, a marine national park close to Malaysia; and Kho Phratong, on the Andaman Sea coast. Kho Jum is no longer as laid back as it was some years ago, while Kho Tarutao and Kho Phratong let you still experience large, empty sand beaches. Kho Tarutao and Kho Phratong are probably a place only for the more adventurous as accommodation is fairly simple. Just beware of the sand flies and the small jelly fish, should you be allergic to one or both, and the possibility that a tsunami might again hit the islands. The 2004 tsunami was devastating for Phra Thong and remains of it can still be seen in many places.

Rain, rain, rain

After three months, I see the very first raindrops! Finally – how I waited to see and feel the heavy rain, and to experience something that is close to the rainy summer monsoon season.

It did actually rain heavily in Bangkok several times during the last month, but each time I narrowly managed to escape to a dry and sunny place. The massive rain that fell on Bangkok during one of these days clogged the drainage system (probably all the plastic that is lying around was washed into the system and tapped the small drainage pipes) and led to extensive flooding. People were wading in dirty water up to their knees in many parts of Bangkok. And – I had missed all of that!

Interestingly the Governor of Bangkok, instead of doing something, told the people that they should move to Chiang Mai or other high-lying regions, if they could not stand some flooding. This created an outcry on Facebook, and the second time the streets were flooded a week or two ago, he behaved better and put on the face of a real father of the city, being concerned and trying to avert the situation.

And now it is raining again, heavy rain non-stop and thunderstorms: the perfect start of the Songkran Festival and of the summer monsoon season. It feels cozy to sit inside and to watch and hear the rain hitting the surrounding roofs and filling up the little garden, and to see the big palm trees bend under the rain and the strong wind. Am just curious how long it will take until the roof in my Victorian-style house starts to leak! And – how long will it take until the rain ends? I am hungry and need some food and to get food I need to get out of the house and walk 20 minutes to the next restaurant ….. but the streets are already flooded and the drainage holes are clogged … interesting!?

I did eventually get out of the house and saw all the food-phone-motorbikers in action, who pick up and deliver food to those who do not want to leave their apartment. Now I have the number, just in case for next time!

Mosquitoes versus sand flies

My weekend retreat started out really nice. Fresh air, acceptable temperatures, few tourists, an almost empty beach, friendly people, lovely sun rises and sun sets and good food. What could be better! I went for long walks along the beach, made a few videos documenting beach processes for my undergraduate lectures, and did yoga on the beach each morning at 6:30 am. Until I got bites on my feet, legs, and arms. Big ones with a tiny spot in the middle, where the insect had actually ripped off a little piece of skin. The bites became quickly really big and itchy. Treatment with white tiger balm (my usual cure for mosquito bites) did not help, so I changed to yellow tiger balm, tried vinegar and Jiaranai’s miracle cream, but the skin around the bites just kept swelling up until my foot was so big that I could hardly walk anymore.

Are these fire ant bites, I asked myself, and others who should be familiar with all these insects. Maybe sand flies, someone said. Google did not help and all the images that came up when I searched for fire ants and sand flies were just not nice to look at, so I gave it up, resigned to my destiny and accepted the itching and swelling and resumed to more vinegar and yellow tiger balm treatment.

Today, finally I saw the insect in action: a tiny, ugly black and white fly, that bit me and left a little hole on my arm. I quickly left the beach and went back to the house, only to discover that I had got many more new bites also on my legs, arms and neck!

Time to leave the beach and get back into the safe heaven of crazy Bangkok, where only mosquitoes and high temperatures make my life difficult!

Yoga on the beach

Submitted my research proposal, finished up a manuscript, and can feel the toll on my back after hours of just sitting and writing and thinking. Bangkok’s heat is also just too much for me. Although I really like warmer temperatures, my liking ends when the thermometer reaches above 35 degrees C. Mid-day temperatures here now feel like 45 degrees C. Time to escape from the big city and to take care of my physical and mental well being: Yoga on the beach in Sam Roi Yod, biking, swimming and walking!

Sam Roi Yod is about 300 km to the south of Bangkok in the Province of Pranburi. It is a nice, laid-back place close to a big National Park and is still not overrun by tourists or has not yet experienced the hotel-at-each-spot-close-to-the-beach-building-boom. Sam Roi Yod can easily be reached by train or bus from Bangkok to Hua Hin, from where it is a 30 minutes taxi ride.

This time I took a train instead of one of the mini buses, whose drivers are among the most crazy, one can imagine. The train ride however is nice and fairly comfortable if one chooses the air conditioned express train. Breakfast and lunch (not the best though) is served, the train seems to be on time and it is possible to see parts of Thailand not just from the highways, but from an entirely different perspective. Not so much towns and cities and new buildings, and endless roads and traffic jams, but paddy fields, plantations, canals, small villages and also quite a few really shabby and poor dwellings. Arriving in Hua Hin is also a very pleasant feeling, a bit like stepping back in time, when trains were much more important than cars.

Jiaranai Aroka, a most lovely woman, runs a small yoga school in Sam Roi Yod close to the beach. She also rents out rooms in her big house (or her whole big house with swimming pool), has bikes for rent, makes yummy fruit shakes and prepares delicious food.

Since not many people had signed up for Yoga classes, I was often the only one – what a luxury! 6:30 am may also be a bit early for most people, but it is the best time of the day, cool, quiet and with beautiful sunrises over the islands. My days were thus filled with yoga once or twice a day, biking, swimming, and walking. And since the wifi connection was so good at Jiaranai’s place, I even managed to get quite some work done!

My daily walk to the subway

I have written about my (almost) daily walk to the metro station before, but I never documented this arduous enterprise with some pictures. It is arduous (at least for me) because there really is no space for walking, and if there is space, then it is taken up by parked cars, hawkers, tables, rubbish bins, or what ever there is.

I am always really glad when I have finally made it to the subway, when I can escape from the cars and motorbikes, from the pollution and the heat, and can disappear down to the cool and super clean subway station.

As I noticed today, the small space beside the narrow road it is not just a problem for pedestrians, but also for the cars, which are parked alongside the road. The grey car that had been parked here for quite some time had always been intact. Not so today – the back lights had been seriously damaged. I am just wondering if the owner found out who did it, or if he/she just has to take these small damages for granted?

Not my choice of place

Phuket Island and Phuket town are not places that are high on my must-see wish list, but there is a lake, and a promising one actually that even contains sediments. This is a rarity, since many lakes in Thailand have been dredged and emptied of their sediments. And since we really need more sediment from lakes in southern Thailand, so that we may be able to (some time in the future) make a real paleoclimate North-South transect, we headed off to Phuket to core this recently discovered lake WITH sediments (thanks to Waw and Pi for this discovery!).

Luckily we did not stay in a hotel along the coast, but in a fairly quiet place in the central part of the island called Phuket Bike Resort. This friendly place with large, nice and clean rooms and easy access to a pool and free wifi was ideal for us, since we only had to drive a few kilometers to our lake.

We only shortly visited the – in Sweden so – famous Phuket beaches once, to deliver coring equipment to colleagues who were organising a tsunami symposium and needed our boat and corer. The drive from the central part of Phuket Island to the beaches along the east and southeast coast was not a nice one. Beach after beach was cramped with hotels, restaurants and tourists, and the roads were choked by traffic, 4WDs, busses, motorbikes, tuk tuks and lorries.

Several of these beaches had been terribly hit by the 2004 tsunami, but no trace of it is left, and hotels are being build as close to the beaches as only possible, and as tight as possible. I got the feeling of a complete building boom, where every little corner is being used to build yet another hotel, restaurant, disco, or golf course.

This place is so far from the Thailand I am used to. Walking around in what is probably the center of Kata Beach with its tourist shops and tourists, it felt like any large (and hugely ugly) tourist resort anywhere in the world. This short visit made it quite clear that this place is not my place and that I prefer the few undeveloped beaches that still exist in other places here in Thailand. The question is just: for how long?

Sunrise over Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat, this legendary temple and city or state of the Khmer Empire has been part of our discussions for the last two years. The Khmer Empire existed between 800 and 1430 AD. The Khmer kings built wonderful temples and huge city states, and enlarged their empire by including also large parts of Thailand. Whenever the Khmer Empire is discussed, their enormous dependency on water is mentioned. This can be seen by the construction of moats, barays (large water reservoirs) and canals, which provided enough water for irrigating the surrounding paddy fields.

The Khmer Empire more or less suddenly vanished or was replaced by another powerful empire. Hypotheses to explain the weakening of the empire often invoke drought, i.e. that several intervals with a distinctly weaker summer monsoon would have pushed the water-dependent society over the edge. Tree ring records and our own famous record from Pa Kho register intervals of severe drought which more or less coincide in time with the final decades of the Khmer Empire. But did water scarcity and climate really made this empire disappear, or was it not rather the strict hierarchical society and the inability to cope with changing conditions?

Last weekend, together with Moo and Pare, I finally managed to see this mythical place, Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, and many of the other wonderful sites that are clustered around the main big temple.

We left our hotel at 5:30 am to be there in time for the sunrise. We were not alone! Hundreds of people had the same idea, of course and were waiting for the magical moment when the sun rose behind and above the towers of Angkor Wat. But not only tourists were busy waiting for the sunrise, local hawkers (adults and children) saw their moment to sell breakfast, coffee, books, what ever, to the waiting tourists.

And then the sun suddenly rose – and within no time it was high above the sky and a very hot day started. Time for us to finally eat breakfast and get ready for a full-day tour of the remains of the Khmer Empire!

Money, money, money

Living in Bangkok is not very expensive, at least not when trying to live the way most Thai live.

A short ride on a taxi motorbike costs 15 THB*, the trip with the underground to the university costs 25 THB, and a simple, but good lunch in the university restaurant costs 30 THB.

The luxury of having one’s hair washed, cut and dried amounts to 500 THB, a one-hour foot massage costs 300 THB, and a pedicure 200 THB. Going out for dinner with ten people, eating well and drinking a few beers may end up around 1000-2000 THB. A really luxurious 2.5 hour treatment in a really luxury place is more expensive and costs about 2000-2500 THB, and four tailor-made shirts with the best cotton are around 4000 THB.

However, the bill for one person drinking a glass of French organic wine, eating spaghetti and a lemon pie in a French restaurant is 700 THB.

Yes – there are differences!

*Thai Baht exchange rates are:
100 THB = 27 SEK, 3 USD, 2.9 €, 2 GBP, 3 CHF

Expats versus immigrants

Last week was a German Film Festival week here in Bangkok. Moo, who speaks fluently German and has her connections to the Goethe Institute and the German Embassy, got a few free movie tickets.

The first film to be screened was called the ‘Golden Goose’ and since I had no idea what it was all about, I went along. Had I thought a little bit, or had I only started to dig in my memory, then I would have realized that the ‘Golden Goose’ is a famous Brüder Grimm fairy tale, a story I had read over and over again as a kid. The film was, of course, aimed at kids and was really well made and nice, but the audience was only made up of adults. Probably expats most of them, who needed to hear some spoken German, meet other German expats, and get some free beer at the reception before the movie started.

Expats is actually a funny word. Everyone calls the English, German, Swedes, Danes, French, Dutch, Australians, Americans, Slovenians, Russian, etc. expats here, and so do the expats themselves. They have their little clubs, where they meet, their not so little restaurants where they eat (run by expats), their expensive food shops, where they buy food, and their own little resorts, where fellow countrymen/-women come for holidays (much nicer to be among themselves than mix with the locals).

But a much better word for all the expats here would actually be immigrants, because they all are immigrants here in Thailand (not officially, but unofficially) and they behave just like many immigrants behave in a foreign country: meet fellow countrymen/-women, buy groceries that remind of the food at home, eat the food they are used to eat, and do not speak the language of the country they are living in.

So what is actually the difference between being an expat and an immigrant? Who defines what is what? The big difference in my opinion is that immigrants feel like underdogs and expats feel and behave like they own the place – a typical expression of feeling superior. Same, same, but very different!

Bangkok transport

Bangkok’s traffic jams are well known and the best way to avoid them is to use the subway (MRT) or the Skytrain (BTS). Both are easy to use, quick, clean, air conditioned, comparably cheap and really well organized. So much nicer than sitting in a taxi surrounded by hundreds or thousands of cars, which hardly move.

Yet another easy way to move through the rows of standing cars, is the use of a motorbike. I have become a bit friendly with motorbike taxis and occasionally use one, especially when there is less traffic. But I have not got used to sharing the motorbike with several other people, as many people here do. For many families, a motorbike is like a car, and can transport up to four persons, mother, father and two kids; or mother/father and three kids, from youngest to oldest. It does look a bit scary though to see a mother or father transporting several kids on her/his motorbike: one in the front, and two in the back, and none of them is wearing a helmet. Even the smallest kids are placed on the motorbike, and even those who have not really woken up in the morning, but need to get to school. What if one of the kids falls off, because it cannot hold on tight enough to the driver? Or if one of the big 4WD crashes with a motorbike?

Despite the seeming chaos on the streets here, despite the many cars and even more motorbikes, despite the sometimes crazy taxi drivers (some think they are rally drivers), and despite the frequent use of cell phones (yes taxi drivers race ahead and talk in their phones at the same time), I have so far not seen an accident, heard an ambulance or a police car. Maybe drivers are very observant and accidents are rare? Or maybe I have just been lucky so far or happened to be somewhere else when an accident occurred? But then, how would the police car or ambulance even manage to get through to an accident when the streets are so completely clogged?

Yellow mangoes

Now the season starts for the delicious and sweet yellow mangoes, which are only available between March and June, since mango trees bear fruits only once a year. Many different types of mangoes actually exist, but the yellow mango tastes best of all and I can’t get enough of it: just as it is or together with sticky rice.

When I buy mangoes in my local grocery store, the woman who owns the shop tells me: this mango can be eaten today, but for this one you need to wait a day or two. And of course she is right. Only when the mangoes extrude the sweetest possible smell and just before they are overripe, then it is the right time to cut them up and eat them.

Mangoes seem difficult to eat, because they have this big, elongated, thin seed in the middle. The easiest way is to slice along the flat part of the seed on both sides. With a nice and clean cut, one ends up with two mango halves, which can be eaten just as they are, using a spoon, or they can be cut in very nice rectangles, turned around or up a bit.

And here it is the fantastic yellow mango, including a picture of a nicely sliced mango:

http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-image-yellow-mango-image23269526

Having eaten loads of these delicious mangoes, I don’t think I ever again want to taste the sour and hard mangoes, which are sold in Swedish supermarkets and hardly ever ripen.

But there are not only just mangoes, or mangoes with sticky rice now! There are also mango shakes, mango smoothies, mango ice cream, mango cookies, dried mango, and so much more.

Mango with sticky rice – picture and recipe:

More about mangoes in Thailand ….

http://thailandforvisitors.com/general/food/fruit/mango.html

…. and about mangoes in general

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mango

Tropical Fruits – book by Julia Morton

Mosquitoes – no thank you

It is almost 2 months now since I arrived in Bangkok. Looking through my WordPress posts I realize that I have not written very much about all my adventures and travels, about my meetings and impressions. I only managed to write just a few posts in almost two months, and still I experience so much every day! More than enough for many many blogs!

My walk to the subway station is still as hazardous as in the beginning when I came, but now I am so much more used to having cars and motorbikes just 10 cm off my feet. The traffic is still the same, with enormous traffic jams between 9 am and 7 pm. Temperatures are increasing daily and are now at around 37-38 degrees C, but feel like 45-47 degrees C. Working is thus really only possible in air conditioned rooms (at least for me), and the huge shopping centers fill up with people who try to escape the heat. More and more flowers are now popping up and if it were not for the heat, then it would feel as if spring had arrived!

My little compaignons, the mosquitoes, are getting more and more crazy. I have already used up several bottles of non-toxic spray without much success. These nasty little beasts still bite me, and actually very much! Yesterday was the monthly Pest Control Day, which meant that one either had to stay in the room (ventilation on) or far away from the apartment house, because someone would come and spray stuff so that the mosquitoes and other small insects would die (this was about the only information I got when I asked). I chose to be far away from the place, because my apartment has no ventilation, so I did miss the spectacle. However when I came home, the mosquitoes were gone (relief!), and so were the lovely birds, which used to sing in the trees in front of my window. The only animal I could spot this morning was a little squirrel. But tonight they were back again, the mosquitoes, back in my room biting me. Hopefully the birds are back tomorrow!!*

*yes they were – also the birds are back again, singing cheerfully.

My little pet

I don’t seem to be alone in my small apartment in the middle of Sukhumvit in Bangkok. Last evening I heard a loud noise typical for the small, almost translucent geckos, which are common everywhere. You hardly see them, but you can clearly hear them.

Although my windows are always open during the day, I do have mosquito nets which I thought close fairly well. But they don’t close so well actually, there are gaps and holes of up to 1 cm2, which makes for an easy pass for a small gecko, and for mosquitoes! A closer inspection of the walls and of the floor of my apartment made it obvious that there are many more gaps, bigger than those in the window frame. But maybe only the gecko has discovered these holes and not the mosquitoes, because so far I have not been bitten by too many.

The other night I walked along one of the dimly lit narrow streets in my neighborhood. These streets have almost no space for pedestrians, except for the 30 cm wide drainage channels, which sometimes exist on both sides of the street. Walking is thus an adventure, especially when you are about one foot away from a huge car that is passing by. In order to avoid clashing with a car or motorbike, I usually look out really carefully before I round a big bush hanging out into the street or parked cars, or any other obstacles. There I stood last night behind a bush and fallen leaves, waiting for a good moment to cross the street, when the lights of a passing car illuminated a huge lizard in front of me. One tiny step forward and I would have had an even more interesting encounter. The lizard was completely motionless and half covered by leaves. Cars were passing by, not more than 10 cm from its head. I watched it for a few minutes and then crossed the street and hoped that it would survive.

A day in the jungle of northern Thailand

The Bangkok heat and traffic (speak pollution) is sometimes really too much and spending a weekend in cooler northern Thailand seems to be the perfect escape. A place I had wanted to see for a long time is the small town of Mae Hong Son, some 350 km to the west of Chiang Mai, and close to the border of Myanmar.

Mae Hong Son and its surroundings are home to many different hill tribes, such as the Karen and Shan, who run community based eco-friendly resorts and organize shorter and longer treks in the mountain areas. The province of Mae Hong Son is however also known for the many refugees who have fled from Myanmar and who are – after decades – still living in refugee camps along the border. Not much about these refugee camps, or about any of the other refugee camps along the Thai-Myanmar border is mentioned in the western press, but details can be found on the UNHCR web page.

Together with a Karen guide and a young student studying tourism in Bangkok and who was on an internship in Mae Hong Son, I set out to explore the mountains and the jungle south of Mae Hong Son. It needed a 4WD to reach the remote Karen villages located a long a narrow and winding dirt road, and at one point, even the 4WD could not get any further and we had to go on walking. A local Karen helped us to find our way, up and down the steep hills and through river beds, explained all the edible jungle plants to us and prepared a delicious lunch in the middle of the forest: water from the nearby river, herbs and vegetables collected during our walk, dried meet and some spices, and tea from his own plants, which he had with him in his small backpack. All of it cooked and eaten in newly prepared bamboo dishes!

The friendly Karen communities earn money by guiding people in the forests, by showing them around the villages, and by explaining how local people (at least some) still stick to the traditional way of using wild plants and herbs for cooking and medical purposes, how people grow and harvest vegetables, make baskets, spin cotton, dye with plants and weave, and thatch their roofs with large leaves collected in the forest.

March and April are also the months when local farmers burn vast areas of the forest to obtain more land for cultivation and to get rid of all the fallen leaves. Smoke is in the air almost all day, and fires and burnt surfaces can be seen all over the place. It is however amazing that these fires don’t lead to huge forest fires, but seem to be controlled in one way or other.

A lovely place to stay is Fern Resort, some 10 km south of Mae Hong Son, with good food and friendly staff.

And the sea never rests

Svante Björck from the Geology Department, Lund University in Sweden is currently also visiting Chulalongkorn University. His lecture on Quaternary Sea Level Changes – A Complex Story was well attended. About 70-80 students and many staff members quickly filled the lecture room and followed Svante’s lecture with great interest.

One may think that Thai students are a bit shy to ask questions. But these students were definitely not shy, and asked many questions and wanted to be completely sure that they had understood everything correctly. Living in a country where ice sheets were never present (at least during the last 2.6 million years), it must sound strange to hear about the large ice sheet that covered Sweden 20,000 years ago and how it still affects land uplift in Sweden.

Researchers from the Department of Marine Sciences also attended Svante’s lectures, which provided a nice opportunity to meet scientists working with marine sediments from the Andaman Sea and the Gulf of Thailand. New connections to follow up!

For those of you interested in Svante’s lecture, here is the abstract:

Quaternary Sea Level Changes – A Complex Story

The presentation will focus on the processes that determine sea level changes in a world with waxing and waning continental ice sheets, a typical feature for the Quaternary period (the last 2.6 million years). Apart from storing huge amounts of water on land, and thereby lowering sea levels, the loading and unloading of ice sheets have a great impact on the elastic lithosphere and the rheology of Earth´s mantle. While the former has a direct effect in glaciated regions, the latter influences the horizontal flow of the highly viscous asthenosphere (upper mantle). In addition, the glacial-interglacial sea level changes cause vertical motions of the ocean bottoms, the glacio-hydro isostatic effect. This means that the build-up and melting of the North American and Eurasian ice sheets have had a global impact, both in terms of eustatic and isostatic processes. I will give examples on how these processes influence different parts of the world: glaciated regions; regions situated peripherally to the ice sheets; and regions far away from any glaciation. I will also present different ways of establishing sea level changes, during glacial, deglacial and interglacial conditions. Finally I will show some examples of ongoing sea level changes, of which some are not connected to the cryosphere (Earth´s ice covered surfaces).

Dress code

All students at Chulalongkorn University need to dress properly and wear a special, but simple uniform: dark trousers and white shirts for boys and dark skirts and white blouses for girls. And proper shoes of course, no sandals or flip flops. The only thing that differs between students from different faculties and departments is the belt they wear and the small ornament on the belt. Geology students moreover often wear a short little greenish-brown shirt, especially when they are working in the laboratory or are out in the field.

The other day I had a long chat with the head of the Department of Geology, Assistant Professor Dr. Thasinee Charoentitirat, on how we could create a better student exchange between our two departments. Many courses here are given in English, and the Department seems to be pretty strong in Petroleum Geology. I will meet again with Thasinee in a few weeks to learn more about the courses that are offered, their requirements, and their schedules, so that I can provide potential students from Stockholm University with better information.

Outreach is very important here too and many students are engaged in informing the public about geology. In the coming days, the geology students will welcome school kids from different schools and will teach them what geology is and how important the subject is for society.

Lakes and wetlands tell an important story

A few days ago, I gave a lecture to undergraduate students in geology at Chulalongkorn University. I chose the title ‘Lakes and wetlands tell an important story’ since the focus of our Asian monsoon project is on lakes and wetlands in Thailand, and on using sediments to reconstruct past climatic and environmental changes.

I was surprised to see so many students attending the lecture, and was even more surprised by all the clever questions I got after the lecture.

Having worked pretty much with our latest Lake Kumphawapi manuscript (thanks to my sabbatical, which finally gives me time to read and write!), I was able to show the most recent results and interpretations we now have regarding the lake’s development and its response to moisture availability.

Last week we were also notified that the manuscript on Lake Pa Kho’s 2000 year long history is finally accepted and online in Quaternary Science Reviews. Pa Kho’s record provides us with the very first, detailed reconstruction of moisture availability and as such summer monsoon intensity changes, and shows several distinct shifts between drier and wetter conditions.

Below is the abstract of the lecture at Chulalongkorn University

Lakes and wetlands are important geological archives because they preserve a detailed sedimentary record of past climatic and environmental changes. By analyzing different biological, physical and chemical proxies in these sediments it is possible to reconstruct how the lake/wetland and its catchment evolved and changed over time. These changes may be linked to shifts in climate, to human activities, or to a combination of both. As such lake and wetland sedimentary records can inform us about natural climate variability, about the way lakes/wetlands responded to dramatic changes in temperature and/or moisture availability in the past and also reflect how humans modified and impacted these ecosystems.

Few natural lakes/wetlands with intact sediments remain in Thailand since many have been altered to provide fishing and agricultural resources. Within the frame of a joint research project between Stockholm and Chulalongkorn University we have investigated a number of lake/wetland sedimentary records in different parts of Thailand during the past seven years. These records show in detail how lakes/wetlands responded to changes in the strength of the Asian summer monsoon and inform us about the climatic and environmental history of the past 50,000 years.

Another week in Bangkok

It is almost three weeks now since I arrived here in Bangkok, and almost two weeks since I moved into the apartment at House by the Pond. Time passes by really quick!

Inside House by the Pond

View from a roof top over Bangkok

My daily walks to and from subway station have become a routine as I am passing the same people each morning and evening. The walk to the subway is however not very easy since few places exist where pedestrians can actually walk safely. Mostly I have to share the small street with motorbikes and cars, which makes the short walk a bit of a challenge. My other option would be to get on a motorbike taxi. This is what most people do to avoid walking along the busy street, but I am not really sure what the best option actually is: walking 5 minutes and being afraid of being overrun by a car or motorbike, or taking a motorbike taxi and being afraid of crashing.

Walking from the subway to Chulalongkorn University is however much easier. There are walkways for pedestrians and there are fewer cars. The university campus is also generally very pleasant for walking given the many trees that provide shade, the low buildings and much less traffic.

During some days there is a market on campus, where people sell food and many other things. Buying a lunch at the market is a nice change from eating in the university restaurant or in nearby restaurants.

Food market on campus

Chulalongkorn University restaurant

Countryside weekend

To escape the Bangkok chaos, pollution, and heat, I moved out into the countryside for the weekend, more specifically to The Thai House in Nonthaburi, which is some 22 km northwest of Bangkok. It takes about one hour to drive here if the traffic is not too heavy, but it took almost two hours because of the continuous traffic jams.

The Thai House is a beautiful teak wood building made in the traditional Thai style on stilts. There are eight rooms for visitors on the upper level, and a large eating room, kitchen and garden on the ground floor. The rooms have teak wood floors and walls and are furnished with old-style teak furniture. The windows have only mosquito nets and no glass so that the air can freely circulate. A terracotta-tiled terrace with large plants joins the rooms together. It is a very nice and cozy place and it is surprising that not more people have found there way to the Thai House!

Pip and her big family really make one welcome here. She explains everything in excellent English, knows a lot about all kinds of plants and how to use them for different purposes, and is easy to talk to. She has seen the area changing from only rice fields and a few houses to what is now a busy village. There were no roads when she grew up and the only way of transport was by boat on the maze of small canals. It is actually possible to get by boat from here into Bangkok in about two hours! People still use the canals for transport, and to get to the market, but most of them now go by car.

During the big flood a few years ago, the whole area was flooded and the water reached about 1-1.5 m above the present level. People had to resort to their boats again for being able to move around. The flooding was really bad and destroyed many buildings, gardens and orchards. Some people are still repairing the damages, and even in Pip’s garden one can still see how the flooding destroyed the trees, although the vegetation is recovering.

To bless the new restored garden and to commemorate the death of Pip’s parents, the family organized a big blessing today with monks chanting and loads of good food. Relatives, staff and neighbors had prepared a lot of food for the monks and for all the people joining the celebration. It was really nice that they asked me to come along and experience this important family day. I just wished I could speak Thai so that I could more easily talk to the children and to the people who don’t speak English!

Making choices

What always strikes me when traveling abroad is that there are so many different ways of looking at things. Nothing is black and white, but everything comes in numerous shades of grey and depends on what kind of baseline one has and what the circumstances are.

In Sweden for example no one could drive or sit on a motorbike without wearing a helmet. Here in Bangkok, while most of the motorbike taxi drivers have helmets, their passengers don’t because there are no spare helmets for them. Motorbike taxis are very frequent here and everyone uses them, because it is so much easier to get from one point to another as compared to using cars, especially in the complicated labyrinth of the small lanes (sois) that stretch out from the main roads. From the place where I am staying now it is a ten minutes walk to the next subway station. It is not a very pleasant walk because of all the cars and no real walk way, but it is ok in the mornings, when traffic is still not too heavy. However in the evening walking would mean passing through some dark lanes, where car drivers might not even see me, and which seem not entirely safe either. So what is my choice to get back ‘home’? Walking in the dark? Searching for a taxi, which would need to make many turns to find the right soi? Taking a motorbike taxi without a helmet? Although neither of these options was a good one, my choice fell on the motorbike. I just did what all the other people did, who got off the subway at the same stop, I took a motorbike taxi and got back all right and within less than 5 minutes.

Studying abroad

It is almost a week now since I arrived in busy Bangkok. The culture shock has subsided and I am adjusting, although it is still difficult to get used to the heat, the traffic and above all – the heavy pollution. But most of my days are anyway spent inside, in the air conditioned office at Chulalongkorn University’s Geology Department. Here it is cool and quiet, except for the constant noise of the air condition.

Chulalongkorn University has an exchange agreement with Stockholm University, meaning that Swedish students can take courses here, and that Thai students can enroll at Stockholm University, without paying tuition fees, and that course credits can be transferred. It also means that teachers/researchers from both universities can visit each other and spend time at the respective partner university for research and/or teaching. However so far the exchange has not been very extensive. Only few students and researchers from Stockholm University have spent some time here, and few Thai students have visited Stockholm University.

Given the large number of international students at Chulalongkorn University from all over Asia, the USA and many European countries (I have heard French, German, Dutch and Italian speaking students), maybe also more students from Stockholm University will start studying here a term or two?

Part of my visit to Chulalongkorn University is aimed at creating closer ties with the Department of Geology, so that it will become easier in the future to welcome Swedish and Thai students, respectively.

Bang Kra Jao – the green lung of Bangkok

A mere 5 minute boat ride separates busy Bangkok from Bang Kra Jao, a beautiful oasis with small villages, old wooden houses on stilts, temples, markets, local artists, small canals, raised walk ways, gardens, parks, and forests. Surrounded by a large meander of Chao Praya, this area feels like a forgotten island amidst the chaos of Bangkok.

Cars and motorbikes move slowly on the small roads and there are numerous small lanes and walk ways, perfect for biking. The floating market is still a real market with locally grown vegetables and tasty Thai food, the small wooden houses are surrounded by canals, beautiful gardens and orchards, the parks house numerous animals, and tourists are virtually absent. It feels as if time has stood still.

Bang Kra Jao is protected by law and huge development projects are thus not possible. However one can observe a few large, almost palace-like villas, which are surrounded by extensive gardens and protected by high fences. Maybe their owners help protecting the place?

From floor 26 to floor 2

It is definitely not easy to find a serviced apartment here in Bangkok given the requirements I have: quiet location, nice neighborhood, close to the subway and to Chulalongkorn University, not higher than floor 10, and if possible in an old style house.

Prior to coming here, I searched the internet and found all kinds of exclusive apartments, ranging in price from 200 to 1000 Euro/night, all of which were situated higher than floor 20 in one of the super high rises that make up Bangkok’s skyline. Nothing close to what I had had in mind. Most of the apartments, whether cheap or expensive were, however, only for longer rentals of six months or more.

But in the end and when I was close to giving up, I did find several less expensive apartments, which seemed acceptable, but were still a far way from my idealized place. With my list of apartments I spent a whole day (with the help of Nut) going around from place to place, from floor 26 to floor 8, and from neighborhood to neighborhood. Apartments #1 and #2 were on floor 26 and 20, respectively of a completely new building on campus. The view over Bangkok from so high up was of course great, but I could have never enjoyed it, because I would never have gone near the windows or out on the balcony!

Apartments #3, 4, and 5 were less high – floor 10-15 only, and seemed quite ok, but not for a longer stay. The last place of the day was Nonsi Residence, cheap and fairly clean, with a shuttle bus to the university (twice a day), but located more or less in the middle of the major express highways! They had rooms on floor 8 and I took my chance and rented a 60 square meter apartment with a view on a school and the swimming pool, and moved happily in with all my stuff.

What I did not realize then was that the windows face south and southwest: meaning sun all day and with a daily temperature of 32 degrees C, this makes for a lot of air conditioning; that the little streets in the surroundings have no shops or restaurants and feel pretty deserted: meaning no walking alone after 6 pm, only and always take a taxi; that the subway station is close, but still not close: I need to take a taxi to get there and the taxi needs to make a large detour and a U-turn; walking is not advised, because it would mean crossing the Express Highway.

After the first night here I realized that this place is not my place, that I would not survive more than a few days, and that I urgently need to change my current situation and find somewhere else to stay.

More internet searches and testing the availability of several places online did not lead me any further. So today I decided to go to my top choice and ask directly if they had an apartment available for the coming months. And they did! On the first floor of a cozy older house. Next week I will move to this place, the House by the Pond, with a nice garden, just off Sukhumvit, but in a quiet small side lane with small restaurants and shops. I really hope that this is the place I had been looking for!

Same same, but different

So here I am, back in Bangkok and back at the lovely and friendly Sasa guesthouse – my favourite place here.

After 9000 km or 9 hours of travel I am in a part of the world where I will spend the coming three months. Not escaping the winter and the darkness, but trying to further build up research connections with Chulalongkorn University and hopefully also discussing how we can facilitate student exchange in the future. And most of all, I will together with my former PhD students Moo and Nut write up results of our Thailand monsoon project.

It is thus very likely that my blog during the coming months will be full of thoughts, observations and comments regarding my sabbatical here!

Plant remains from ancient sediments

During the weeks before Christmas I was busy at the microscope looking through sample after sample to select plant remains for radiocarbon dating. Radiocarbon dates provide us with an age for our sediment sequences, and to obtain good and valid ages, it is important to select the right type of organic material and to work in a clean environment to avoid any type of contamination. Radiocarbon dating is expensive, but without many dates, it is not possible to establish a good chronology. And only a well-dated sequence allows for comparisons and correlations to other well-dated sequences.

Before I could sit at the microscope, all our sediment cores had to be sampled and each sample had to be sieved, so that the fine sediment particles disappeared. What was left in the sieve, was what I could examine under the microscope. It is fascinating to go through sample after sample and to see how the composition of the organic material changes through time. Leaf fragments, seeds, flower buds, insect remains, chironomid head capsules, shell fragments, ostracodes, wood and twigs are just a few of all the material that can be observed.

Samples selected for radiocarbon dating will only be composed of terrestrial plant remains, which use atmospheric carbon dioxide, to avoid any bias connected with plants that would take up carbon from the lake water.

Since the tiny plant remains are so beautiful, I post a few pictures here. Too bad the scale disappeared, but imagine that these small, fragile things are not larger than 1-2 mm! Those shown below are about 14,000-16,000 years old and belong to arctic plants that once grew in southern Sweden.

The following pictures are seeds and leaves, and shells from our tropical lake Nong Thale Pron. These are also between 10,000 and 16,000 years old and tiny!

Summing up 2014

At this time of the year people send Christmas cards and wishes for the upcoming year. Some even summarize in shorter and longer reports what they and their family had been up to during the year. These types of letters have however become very infrequent during the past years, probably because all information is anyway available on the respective FB pages or on personal blogs. Thus no need to summarize what has been going on.

Still, I think to sum up provides an opportunity to mentally scan the months since January 2014 and to realize how fast this year has actually passed and how much has happened.

January started off with the Nordic winter meeting in Lund, where Linda Löwhagen presented her very first poster and a heavy cold prevented me from giving a scheduled talk. A short trip to Hong Kong and Singapore and visits to four different universities opened my eyes as to how dynamic Asian universities are and how important it is to create links with these universities. Back in Stockholm I submitted an application for a sabbatical in Asia. This was granted and allows me to spend most of next year at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok and Nanyang Technical University in Singapore.

February continued pretty much with an Asian theme. Kruawan Jankaew from Chulalongkorn University, who is co-advisor for my student Linda Löwhagen, visited to help Linda with her tsunami work; Paul Krusic and I organized a Bolin Centre workshop on the Asian monsoon with invited guests Jessica Tierney and Kevin Anchukaites from Woods Hole; my students Akkaneewut (Nut) Chabangborn, Sakonvan (Moo) Chawchai, Francesco Muschitiello and I visited Queen’s University in Belfast and GAP (invitation by Maarten Blaauw) to see the 14C lab, where all our samples were dated, and to present the Thailand monsoon project.

March and April were busy months: reading and commenting on student manuscripts, seminars, evening course and administration, and preparing posters and talks for the upcoming EGU meeting in Vienna, where we were present with five posters and one oral presentation, and enjoyed the lecture by Sheri Fritz (this year’s Hans Oeschger medalist). I also travelled to Rennes in France to be part of the committee for Rémi David’s PhD defense. This gave me a nice opportunity to connect again with archaeologists (and old friends) and to learn more about archaeology and past vegetation changes in the Paris Basin and the Armorican Massive.

As during the past six years, May was again one of my excursion months, with two weeks in Les Eyzies in the Dordogne. Also in May, my student Francesco Muschitiello successfully defended his licentiate thesis. In June we welcomed Nicki Whitehouse for two weeks so that we could work on a manuscript that had been in the Dropbox drawers for quite some time. It is still not ready, but hopefully will be soon.

July and August are generally the quietest months of the year, since everyone is on holidays, enjoying the Swedish summer, which again was beautiful, warm and gave us loads of sunshine. I tried to write up all the data we have so far for our Thailand lake Kumphawapi – the manuscript is ready, or almost ready, but still needs a thorough revision to also incorporate our new biomarker data sets.

September was again busy, with another week in Les Eyzies (the very last one), teaching two courses and excursions with students to Gotland. As a response to our article “Synchronous records of pCO2 and Δ14C suggest rapid, ocean-derived pCO2 fluctuations at the onset of Younger Dryas” (Steinthorsdottir et al. 2014, Quaternary Science Reviews 99, 84-96), Köhler et al. (who had obviously been one of the reviewers) submitted a several pages long comment questioning our results. It is great that our article got attention (may increase the citations), and hopefully it also opens the eyes of ice core and marine scientists for the potentials of stomata-derived carbon dioxide reconstructions. Margret Steinthorsdottir wrote an excellent reply, which was published recently together with Köhler et al.’s comments in Quaternary Science Reviews.

October was absolutely the busiest month this year: teaching, visits and two PhD defences! This year’s October will stay in my memory for a long time, because my two (former) PhD students Akkaneewut (Nut) Chabangborn and Sakonvan (Moo) Chawchai managed elegantly to defend their respective PhD theses. Both started in spring 2010 and worked very hard during these four years in the lab, in the field and writing up their results, alongside with English lessons. They had a bumpy road, but they took all the challenges and succeeded! Nut’s opponent Karen Kohfeld from Simon Fraser University stayed for two weeks, which made it possible to explore joint future projects, and gave Karen an opportunity to attend three Swedish PhD theses. October’s other highlight was that Tanja Slotte, Laura Parducci and I got a proposal approved by the Science Faculty of Stockholm University for a pilot project and a two-year postdoc to study ancient DNA in lake sediments.

November and December saw me finally in the lab: sampling sediment sequences, sieving samples, checking 560 samples for macrofossils and selecting suitable samples for radiocarbon dating. It has been a long time since I had time for such a luxury! My lab work was only interrupted by a short visit to Bergen University, where I acted as opponent for a PhD defense, and by the visits of Pascale Braconnot (Université de Nantes) and Oli Pryce (CNRS) who talked about the Asian monsoon and PMIP models, and archaeology in Thailand, respectively.

What’s up for next year then? Foremost my sabbatical months at Chulalongkorn University and Nanyang Technical University, proposal writing, the hope to being able to finally finish up old manuscripts and to write new ones, and the start of our metagenomics pilot project! Fingers crossed!

From the Asian monsoon to North Atlantic climate

As an early Christmas present, Francesco Muschitiello’s and my manuscript Time-transgressive environmental shifts across Northern Europe at the onset of the Younger Dryas is now online! After years of excursions into the Asian monsoon, it seems that I am back again into something that has always interested me deeply: chronology and timescales and the dramatic climatic shifts at the end of the last ice age.

Francesco has done an excellent job compiling data sets, placing them on the same chronological framework, and comparing the different records. By doing so, we were able to show that the rapid cooling leading into the Younger Dryas was not felt equally and at the same time in records from Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Ireland. Thus, the start of the Younger Dryas cooling, or better the response to this cooling was time-transgressive. Hopefully, this article leads to the understanding that tuning and assuming synchronicity does not help science forward, and that good radiocarbon chronologies and age models are a way forward to solve the many mysteries surrounding the timing of the response to this cold interval on land.

Here is the link to the article for those who might be interested and the abstract:

Abstract
Until lately, it has commonly been assumed that the last major reorganization of the North Atlantic ocean–atmosphere system, the Younger Dryas climatic reversal, spread synchronously on continental to hemispheric scales. This assumption arose because reliable chronologies, which would allow capturing the complexity surrounding local responses to abrupt climate change, were lacking. To better understand the temporal structure at the inception of the Younger Dryas across the North Atlantic, we revised, updated and compared the chronological framework of four Northern European sediment sequences (Lake Kråkenes, Lake Madtjärn, Lake Gammelmose, Sluggan Bog) by applying classical Bayesian modelling. We found distinct and spatially consistent age differences between the inferred ages of the Allerød interstadial – Younger Dryas stadial pollen zone boundaries among the four sites. Our results suggest an earlier vegetation response at sites along latitude 56–54°N as compared to sites located at 60–58°N. We explain this time lag by a gradual regional cooling that started as early as c. 12,900–13,100 cal. BP. This phenomenon was probably linked to cooling around the Nordic Seas as a result of enhanced iceberg calving from the Fennoscandian Ice Sheet during the final stage of the Allerød interstadial. By contrast, vegetation shifts at sites located further north occurred significantly later and in concert with the establishment of full stadial climate conditions (c. 12,600–12,750 cal. BP). Our study emphasizes the need to develop solid regional 14C chronologies and to employ the same age modelling approach to determine the temporal and spatial response to a climatic shift.

More on SGU’s research funding

Following up on yesterday’s blog, I thought I should mention why I feel so strongly about SGU’s (Geological Survey of Sweden) small and decreasing research budget.

First of all, SGU’s research money is directed at geoscience research being done in Sweden and being of relevance for SGU. As such projects applied for to SGU do not need to be on the cutting edge of science, do not need to be supported by a super outstanding CV and do not need a long publication list with Science and Nature papers. These project proposals just need to be well written and focused, need to have a Swedish geoscience theme, and need to be supported by a CV and a publication list that show that the applicant is capable to do what he/she proposes to do. Several of the project applications may have a possibility to also get financed by other funding agencies, but most often, SGU is the only possible funding option.

Secondly, SGU finances good science and has done so over the past decades. The projects that have been financed have been able to move Swedish geoscience forward and have delivered a wealth of new results, important to SGU and to the Swedish geoscience community. Many of the projects also make use of the different data bases that are available at SGU, and by doing so, create an important link between SGU data sets, the science community and the general public.

Thirdly, I would not be where I am now without research funding from SGU. Twenty years ago, a research grant from SGU saved me from becoming unemployed. This grant made it possible to employ me as research assistant at Lund University, which in turn made it possible for me to also obtain money from the Swedish Research Council (VR) – because I now had a university position. Without SGU’s research grant, I would not have had a position and I would not have been able to get VR research money. Thanks to continued support from SGU for various research projects concerning the Swedish varved clays, I was able to fill my research assistant position with project money and was thus able to survive for six consecutive years. So to cut it short – without financial support from SGU, I would not be Professor in Quaternary geology today.

SGU needs to take funding of external research projects serious. Here I don’t mean joining large and huge research networks or EU projects. I mean providing decent funding for smaller projects that are directly related to Swedish geoscience. If the current trend goes on, there won’t be any more research funding from SGU in the near future.

The statistics on my blog roared yesterday and today. The topic seems definitely to be of interest to many.

Frustration

Each year the Geological Survey of Sweden (SGU) invites research applications on issues that are of importance and relevance for the Geological Survey and for Geosciences in Sweden. Submitted research proposals are evaluated by external reviewers and by members of the research advisory council and are also ranked in respect to relevance internally at SGU. Those projects that receive high ranking by the reviewers and which are judged as highly relevant by SGU are usually funded.

Given that many of the project applications specifically address Swedish geoscience topics (e.g., ore geology, hydrogeology, bedrock geology, Quaternary geology, palaeontology, marine geoscience) and that projects/fieldwork need to be related to and conducted in Sweden, the financial support from SGU is crucial to maintain high-level geoscience research in Sweden.

Over the last 20 years or so, SGU’s research budget for funding of external research projects has been more or less stable at around 5-6 million Swedish Kronor. A budget of 100,000-300,000 SEK per project was widely sufficient twenty years ago and thus allowed SGU to finance many interesting two or three year projects. However, today projects, which include much more expensive salaries and higher overhead costs, may have minimum budgets of >500,000 SEK, and moreover run over three to four years. Yet, the research budget of SGU has not increased and still is 5.7 million SEK/year. Higher costs and research projects that span over several years thus mean that less money is available for new projects. About 50% of the budget (ca. 2.6 million SEK) is tied up for earlier approved projects and the remaining money is reserved for new projects, according information on SGU’s home page.

During the past six years I have been a member of SGU’s research advisory board. Although it seemed that less and less research money had been made available for new projects during each successive year, making the work of the reviewers and of the research advisory group a pretty frustrating task, this year’s round was the most frustrating exercise I had ever experienced.

Six group members from all over Sweden had gathered in Uppsala to evaluate and rank 25 new research proposals. The total budget available for new projects for next year was however only 1.7 million SEK. Given that each project needs a certain minimum funding to being able to start, it can easily be calculated how many projects can at all be financed in the end.

I do not really understand SGU’s policy. First of all, I do not understand why the research budget has not increased during the past decade, given that salaries and overhead costs have increased (an issue raised by the advisory council each year). Secondly, it is unclear to me why research projects should be funded for 3-4 years, instead of for 1-2 years, which would make it easier for new projects to start. Thirdly, I do not understand how SGU can invite researchers to submit research proposals (which take time to write) when so little money can be distributed? And lastly, why should the members of the research advisory board take their time to read and evaluate research proposals, and to meet in Uppsala for a whole long day, when there is hardly any research money to distribute?

I think that SGU needs to evaluate its strategy in respect to research projects thoroughly. The present situation is frustrating, not only for us who evaluate projects, but mostly for those, whose research depends on funding from SGU.

and here are the doi:s

Some of those who read my blog asked for details on the different publications, which I had mentioned in my previous blog. Here they are with full title and DOI number:

Chabangborn, A. & Wohlfarth, B., 2014. Climate over mainland Southeast Asia 15–5 ka BP. Journal of Quaternary Science, 29, 445–454. DOI: 10.1002/jqs.2715. View abstract

Ampel, L., Kylander, M., Steinthorsdottir, M. & Wohlfarth, B., 2014. Abrupt climate change and early lake development – the Late Glacial diatom flora at Hässeldala Port southeastern Sweden. Boreas. DOI:10.1111/bor.12081. View abstract

Dutton, A., Webster, J. M., Zwarts, D., Lambeck, K. & Wohlfarth, B., 2015. Tropical tales of polar ice: Evidence of last interglacial polar ice sheet retreat recorded by fossil reefs of the granitic Seychelles islands. Quaternary Science Reviews, 107, 182–196. doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2014.10.025. View abstract and highlights

Steinthorsdottir, M., de Boer, A., Oliver, K. I. C., Muschitiello, F., Blaauw, M., Reimer, P. J. & Wohlfarth, B., 2014. Synchronous records of pCO2 and D14C suggest rapid, ocean-driven pCO2 fluctuations at the onset of Younger Dryas. Quaternary Science Reviews, 99, 84–96. doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2014.06.021. View abstract

This stomata-based carbon dioxide reconstruction, which showed a significant peak in carbon dioxide before the onset of the Younger Dryas, received pretty much attention, including a several page long comment by Köhler et al. in Quaternary Science Reviews, 107, 267-270. Our answer to Köhler et al. will probably not be the end of the discussion!

It’s been a long time

Yes, I am still around and yes I am fine, and no, I am not lazy, just terribly busy with other things! It has been exactly 41 days since I published my last blog. And so much has happened since.

Two of my (former) PhD students, Akkaneewut Chabangborn and Sakonvan Chawchai have both successfully defended their PhD theses in October, and are now back again in Thailand and at Chulalongkorn University, ready for new adventures. I really hope that they will be able to continue the paleoclimate work that we have started and that they will find many more good lake and wetland sites that will allow us to understand past hydroclimatic conditions in this part of the world better.

The next three students in line are busy preparing for their licentiate exams early next year, which means reading, commenting and correcting their texts.

Several of our manuscripts have been accepted for publication and some are already online: Dutton et al. Last Interglacial sea level on the Seychelles in Quaternary Science Reviews, which is a detailed follow up of the work I had been carrying out on the Seychelles almost 30 years ago. Ampel et al. Lateglacial diatom record in Boreas examines the aquatic flora in the sediments of the little site of Hässeldala. The manuscript by Steinthorsdottir et al. Lateglacial carbon dioxide fluctuations in Quaternary Science Reviews has received considerable attention by those who do not believe in plant stomata as a proxy for carbon dioxide reconstructions. And the latest article by Muschitiello & Wohlfarth in Quaternary Science Reviews shows that the response to Lateglacial climate shifts across parts of Europe was not synchronous. I have a feeling that this latter article will also provoke comments.

Together with Tanja Slotte and Laura Parducci I have recently got funding for a two-year postdoc position and a pilot project to study DNA in ancient sediments (Testing the utility of massively parallel sequencing on ancient sediments). This is a really exciting and challenging new project!

Curiosity drives science

The video (in Swedish) documenting the experiences, thoughts and expectations of the teachers, who are currently enrolled in the research school on natural hazards, was finally released a few days ago. The research school is organized in collaboration with the Department of Geological Sciences, the Department of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, the Department of Applied Environmental Sciences, and the Department of Child and Youth Studies at Stockholm University. It offers a 2.5 year licentiate program and has a major focus on volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, mudflows, and climate. The students who participate in the research school are teachers at different schools in Sweden. During the past two years they had the opportunity of combining teaching at their respective schools (1 day/week) with own scientific research and research education. Now they are in the final phase, which means writing up the research results to be presented and defended as a licentiate thesis.

The recently released film follows some of the twelve students on fieldwork to remote places, documents their expectations at the start of their research education, and highlights the experiences and knowledge that have been gained during the past two years and how these are brought back into the classroom.

It is fascinating to see how engaged the students have become in their respective research topic, how their curiosity to know more and more has led to an in-depth knowledge of the subject and to a broad understanding of what research is, how it works and how much dedication it actually needs. The bundle of experiences and knowledge that is brought back into the schools will hopefully engage many more pupils and arise their curiosity for natural sciences!

A take home message for politicians and headmasters is that school teachers need to be given the possibility to widen their perspectives in close collaboration with universities and research.

The big day

Within one week, two of my PhD students successfully defended their PhD theses: Akkaneewut (Nut) Chabangborn on October 10th and Sakonvan (Moo) Chawchai on October 17.

It was a great and stressful day for each of them – first presenting their thesis work, then discussing the research results with the opponent/s and answering the questions of the committee members, and finally celebrating that it was all done and that the stress was finally over! And how well both of them performed, and how well both were prepared for the most difficult questions.

Following a student from the start of the PhD education until the defense (or viva) is an amazing journey and leads from the unknown to more and more clarity, from problems to problem solving, from rejection of manuscripts to acceptance and publishing, from uncertainty and doubts to self confidence, and from failure to success. It is a tough journey, for both students and supervisors, and it becomes especially tough towards the end when deadlines have to be met and the day of the defense approaches faster and faster. However once the big day is over and the stress is released, a completely new life starts, so completely different from before.

Congratulations Dr. Chabangborn and Dr. Chawchai – I am really proud of you two!

Au revoir Vallée de la Vézère

Back in France, in the Périgord, and in the beautiful Vézère valley, where the very last excursion of the course on human evolution is taking place. Having taught this course now for more than eight years, and after probably a total of 20 excursion weeks to Les Eyzies, it is time to move on and shift focus.

Twenty-eight students from Stockholm University and two from Lund University are attending this year’s autumn excursion, all eager to learn more about Neanderthals, Homo sapiens, their remains, encounters, tools, art, and way of living; about the formation of caves and rock-shelters, about the geology of the region, and how humans made use of geology by selecting the best flint for their tools, searching for manganese or iron oxides to be used for colouring and painting.

The sun is shining, the sky is blue and daily temperatures reach 27 °C during this week. The Vallée de la Vézère is really at its best.

It feels said to say good-bye to all the kind people I have come to get to know in and around Les Eyzies, and who have helped me in many various ways with the excursion: Madame Spadi in Beaune, where we always rented a small house and were always welcomed with a homemade cake; the staff at Abri Pataud, who allowed me to make my own little tour in the abri; Cécile and Florence at the Musée de la Préhistoire, who guided our students in the museum, in Le Moustier, La Ferrassie, La Micoque, and Laugerie Haute a million times and never seem to get tired of us; the staff and guides at the Musée de la Préhistoire, at Font de Gaume, Cap Blanc, and Les Combarelles, who gradually warmed up to us and then did everything they could to arrange things in the best possible way; the guides at Pech Merle and Cougnac, who were always in the mood for a good joke, even though some students did not behave the way they should have; the Plassard family at Rouffignac, who made the visits to my favorite cave each time a fantastic adventure; Philippe and Christine Jugie and their staff at Restaurant Chez Jugie in Laugerie Basse, whose confit de canard will be remembered for ever; the friendly people at Auberge du Musée, where we could sit and be connected for hours on end; Bernard Ginelli, reluctant at first to receive us, soon entertained us with his jokes, while demonstrating how to make bifaces; Roland our kind and friendly driver, who helped in all possible ways and taught the students some basic French; Francesco and Will for driving all the way from Bordeaux to Les Eyzies to give excellent lectures; and last, but not least, Jacqueline, with her knowledge of Sweden, who helped me to understand the French way of doing things. Thank you so much to all of you! I won’t say good-bye, actually, I will say au revoir!

Tovetorp – a little jewel

Stockholm University has a number of research stations, which are all located in beautiful surroundings: the Tarfala Research Station in northernmost Sweden; the Askö Laboratory on the island of Askö in the Baltic Sea; Tovetorp, southeast of Stockholm; and the Navarino Environmental Observatory in Greece. These stations are mainly dedicated to research, but are also frequently used for teaching, meetings, conferences, and field studies, and are definitely worth a visit!

Last year I visited the Navarino Environmental Observatory, where the Bolin Centre for Climate Research had organised a PhD course, and last week I was able to visit the zoological research station Tovetorp, where members of the faculty board held their annual meeting.

Tovetorp is reached after a several kilometer-long drive on small forest roads. It appears suddenly, looking like a small village composed of the typical Swedish wooden houses, in the middle of fields, lakes and forests. Tovetorp ‘belongs’ to the Department of Zoology at Stockholm University, and it is here in this beautiful country side where several important research projects are carried out. Projects deal with different types of birds and their behavior, others study for example butterflies, fish, worms, and different types of mammals. The short tour around the station gave us a flavor of the research that is being conducted, and also showed how important this research station is for studying animals and monitoring their behavior in great detail.

One of the projects that has received quite some attention is focused on comparing the development and behavior of dog and wolf puppies. For this, the station has fenced in two large areas for the dog and wolf puppies, respectively. Thus wolf puppies and dog puppies live separately, but can ‘meet’ each other by watching and smelling each other across the high fences. The fences are pretty high, and the one containing the wolf puppies is actually a double-spaced fence, just to make sure that they can’t escape. By observing the development of wolf puppies, researchers hope to find out much more about dogs and their evolution. This sounds like a really fascinating project!

But – of course we did not come to Tovetorp to learn about animal behavior, we came here to spend two days discussing faculty matters! It felt nice to have a meeting here in the country side, surrounded by forest, fields and fruit trees; no street lights, and complete silence during the night, only to be woken up by a rooster crowing in the morning. In addition, we were served excellent food, which had been prepared by two really skilled local cooks! All in all, this is a great place to hold a meeting!

Following the Icebreaker Oden

About a week ago, most of my colleagues started their long travel via Anchorage and Barrow to the Icebreaker Oden, who will transport them across the Arctic Ocean back to Tromsö and finally to Stockholm. Out of about 25 people in our corridor, 12 have left for Oden’s Leg #2, which means it is really really quiet here on floor 2.

Oden’s whole trip from Sweden to Alaska and back to Sweden can be followed at http://oden.geo.su.se/map/, where a detailed map is displayed. The map provides links to the daily blogs and also up-to-date information on Oden’s speed, air pressure, wind speed, wind direction, water temperature, and sea ice concentration.

Bloggers on Oden from floor 2 include Carina Johansson, Christian Stranne, Francesco Muschitiello and Martin Jakobsson, who have been documenting the trip since August 17. It is fun to read the different blogs, because each provides different and personal perspectives: general impressions of Alaska and Barrow, what has been achieved in terms of work (echo sounding to map the water column, seafloor and sub-bottom sediments), expectations, weather (from calm to rough sea), or, how life feels on board of Oden.

Oden left Barrow on August 21 and has now already arrived at the first coring spot and everyone seems to be really curious to spot the first deep sea mud! Maybe tomorrow we will learn how well the coring operation worked and how many meters of mud could be recovered.

Life is not easy …

The last four to six months as a PhD student are probably the worst – real deadlines have to be met, manuscripts have to be finished, the thesis summary has to be completed, the thesis defense has to be prepared, and the supervisor is suddenly changing from being the friendly mother into becoming a demanding, questioning and sometimes angry parent.

What started out so calmly and nice some four years ago, with endless freedom and time for research, sports, friends, music and Facebook, suddenly turns into a seemingly never ending nightmare, with long working days and sleepless nights, and the advice to restrain from Facebook and to concentrate on the one and only thing: finishing the work!

The weeks leading up the thesis defense are probably the toughest. Questions such as – Will the committee and the opponent regard my work as sufficient and good enough to be defended? Will I be able to answer all the questions at the defense? How well will my lecture go? – will turn round and round ….

Then the big day comes and goes, the student is no longer a PhD student and a new chapter starts.

Pedagogic prize – teacher of the year in natural sciences

Each year Stockholm University invites nominations for the best teachers of the year. Employees and students can nominate a teacher, who has shown excellent pedagogic abilities, who has shown and demonstrated a strong interest in further developing teaching and who just is an excellent teacher.

This year and also last year teachers from the section of Earth and Environmental Sciences received the pedagogic prize among all natural science teachers. Clas Hättestrand from the Department of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology was awarded this year’s teacher of the year, and last year it was Alasdair Skelton from the Department of Geological Sciences, who received the pedagogy prize.

I did a rough calculation on how many teachers in natural sciences received the price over the years and came to 19 persons since 1992 (no prizes were awarded in the years 2005, 2006 and 2010 – maybe no one was nominated?). Of these Geosciences and Biology had obtained most prizes (six each), with the runner up being Physics.

This is a great achievement for Geosciences and shows that we have really good teachers, who have a strong interest in teaching and in developing their teaching, and who are very much appreciated by their students.

So, who were the other awardees in Geosciences? Here is the list of the geoscience teachers who received the prize:

2014 – Clas Hättestrand, Department of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology
2013 – Alasdair Skelton, Department of Geological Sciences
2009 – Ingmar Borgström, Department of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology
2004 – Otto Hermelin, Department of Geological Sciences
2001 – Eve Arnold, Department of Geological Sciences
1992 – Marianne Särkinen, Department of Geological Sciences

The weeks after midsummer

Midsummer in Sweden is not only an important holiday, marking the longest day of the year; it is also the time of the year when life start to slow down. This is especially obvious when it comes to university life. The number of students decreases dramatically, the few campus restaurants gradually close, fewer and fewer people are at work and more and more offices remain empty. Each year geese take over all the green spaces where just a few days ago, students had celebrated the end of the term.

The weeks after midsummer are when most people in Sweden take their holidays, hoping for a nice summer with loads of sunshine and warm temperatures. Too often, however, the summer does not turn out as wished. Temperatures around 15-20 degrees C, rain and wind are a more normal Swedish summer than high temperatures and continuous sunshine. But – it does happen – we do experience gorgeous warm summers with little rain!

The weeks after midsummer and until mid August are special and are probably the quietest time of the year on campus; a perfect time to focus on research, and on all the unfinished work that had been piling up during the term. Time to read articles and to write manuscripts, and maybe prepare for the upcoming autumn term. Or time to relax, meet family and friends, go for long walks, take a sailing trip in the beautiful archipelago or pick mushrooms in the surrounding forests.

But for some the weeks after midsummer are still pretty busy. Stockholm University runs for example a few summer courses, mostly aimed at exchange students. And I know of several PhD students who will defend their work in autumn and who will need to work through the summer to get their thesis ready!

I wish all of you a really nice, relaxing and productive summer! Winter is not very far away!