Wulff Land, 2024-08-28

The research projects that today explore the Gunnar Andersson Valley with the help of Oden and our helicopters have several different angles of approach. One project is looking for lakes that are suitable for sampling bottom sediments for DNA analysis, another research group is made up of geologists, and yet another project is looking for driftwood and collecting data for isotope analysis.

In the exceptionally beautiful valley named after the Swedish polar explorer Gunnar Andersson, several research projects have had fieldwork during the time we have been in the Victoriafjord so far. It is a deep valley in the northern part of the Wulff Land peninsula at the foot of a glacier named after Sven Hedin, and it is clear that Swedish polar explorers influenced the area. Gunnar Andersson took part in early expeditions to both Svalbard and Greenland and was one of the participants in Otto Nordenskjöld's Antarctic expedition (1901 – 1903) aboard the ship "Antarctic".

In addition to the valley in Greenland, Gunnar Andersson also has an island in Antarctica named after him, Andersson Island. Eventually, he became increasingly interested in China and was nicknamed China-Gunnar when the Chinese government employed him for ore geological investigations. In 2018, the book "Polarforskaren som strandade i Kina" was released by sinologist and science historian Jan Romgard, which describes how Johan Gunnar Andersson and a group of field researchers from Sweden and China came to participate in one of the most exciting but unknown races in the history of science.

Text by Åsa Lindgren, expedition coordinator