Hello and welcome to episode 144 of Evtalk, our annual end of the year look back at some of our favorite guests and stories.

I am E.M. Petchenik, not here with Jason. some of our favorite guests and stories.

I am E.M. Petchenik, not here with Jason Rabinowitz this week.

He has the week off.

We talked to so many interesting people this year, some for the first time and some recurring guests that it was

difficult to whittle it down to just a few. But we've done the hard work and I

think we've got a great wrap up of the variety of people that we talk to this year and people with some very

interesting and exciting stories. We've chosen three of our favorite interviews

from 2021 and to kick it off we head south, way south, all the

way to Antarctica for our conversation was Sven Lidstrom of the Norwegian Polar Institute who explained how the Blue Ice Runway at Troll Research Station is operated and maintained. I'd love to know a bit about the physical infrastructure there.

What is the runway like?

How was the construction done to build such a thing in such an inhospitable place.

Take us through the aspects of what that runway is like

and how it was originally built.

Yeah, so it is on blue ice.

It's located about 250 kilometers from the coast, 1,250 meters approximately.

It was built by preparing the ice

is to smooth it out and then that job took about two years to smooth it out and then that job took about two years

to prepare it and then what we do through the season is just we prepare it by

grinding up the ice to get a thin layer of ice chips and snow on top of it and

that's creating the friction on the runway. And if we wanted to, I mean we could have the runway five kilometers or ten if we wanted to, but three is enough. It takes quite a lot of work to keeping it up in good conditions through the summer.

And it's on a glacier ice.

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