*Data for 2016-2017 hydrologic year has been added by Sarah Strand as part of the Permafrost thermal state in Svalbard 2017-2018 (PermaSval) project, a research infrastructure access project funded by the Svalbard Integrated Arctic Earth Observing System (SIOS). Overall and longterm site responsible is Nikita Demidov of AARI (nikdemidov(at)mail.ru).*
The system of long - term permafrost observations was organized on the permafrost site of Russian Scientific Center on Spitsbergen in summer 2016 (Demidov et al., 2016). The monitoring site is established in the vicinity of the mining settlement Barentsburg on a sequence of Holocene marine terraces. The core drilling showed that the thickness of gravel sands and clays with massive and schlieren cryostructure forming the accumulative terraces is of 2 – 7 m. Cretaceous and Neocene fractured sandstones and mudstones underlie them. Automated thermistor cables were installed in three boreholes to the depth 15 m, 15 m and 7 m to monitor the temperature close to the depth of zero annual amplitude and seasonal distribution of zero - degree isotherm.
Borehole is situated at 75.5 m a.s.l. on a flat horizontal surface of accumulative marine terrace. It’s crossection is represented by interlayering of sand, loam and clay with rare boulders. Lower 0,5 m of borehole are in bedrock. Surface of terrace has distinct pattern structure in the form of sorted circles. Outer part of circles is covered by plant cover when in the inner part it is absent and sediments are exposed directly on the surface. In this borehole automated thermistor cable 10 m length with spacing 0,5 m inserted to the depth of 7 m is used. Borehole has plastic casing for all depth.
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