Railway Road
About this walk
This short walk connects the STF Tourist Station with Abisko village. Following very easy terrain and accessible throughout the winter and summer, this audio experience takes just 30 minutes. Hear about the history of the village, find out more about the scientific research taking place here in the Arctic, and learn about some of Abisko.
Distance: 2.5km
Starts: STF Tourist Station / Naturum
Ends: Abisko Village
Tour highlights
Some of the things you’ll learn about on this tour.
Abisko’s winter birds
In April and May, a small, beautiful white bird called the snow bunting travels to Scandinavia to breed. Their preferred habitats are high mountain rocky terrain where they nest in rock crevasses near snowfields. Here they feed on the last year’s berries and seeds, and insects trapped in the snow, which become exposed as the snow starts to melt. The spring of 2020 was particularly warm, and researcher Keith Larson from the Climate Impacts Research Centre caught and ringed record numbers of snow buntings!
Image: Oliver Wright
Abisko Scientific Research Station
The first scientific research station was set up here in 1902. At that time it consisted of just a small house and was destroyed by a fire in 1910. A new station was then built and has been added to and modernized over the last 100 years. Each year around 200 scientists from around the world visit, conducting fieldwork and researching life in this Arctic landscape. In fact, the Arctic is warming at twice the speed of lower latitudes, making Abisko a really interesting and important place to study climate science.
The northern lights
The solar winds interact with the earth’s magnetic field create often beautiful auroras of green, purples, and blues. Even on days were there appears to be no visible auroras, taking a long-exposure photo will reveal whisps of green above your head. The sun has a decadal cycle where sunspot activity shifts from high to low and back again. High activity leads to increased solar wind events sometimes with fantastic intensity.
