Finnish for dummies (like me)

With this short list of Finnish words, you should be able to talk about Life, the Universe & Everything. ;-)

• northern light: revontulet

Revontulet comes from revon (“fox's”) and tulet (“fires”). There is a Finnish folk story, that a fox in the north is running on the snow, and it is sweeping its tail so that sparks fly off into the sky. In addition the Finnish have about 20 different folk stories about the origin of the northern lights. One claims that there is so much fish in the Arctic Sea that the sun light is reflected back into the air from the backs of the fishes. 

Source: http://fc08.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2012/329/c/1/revontulet_by_housunnappi-d4kxbvr.png

• space weather: avaruussää 
• Sun: aurinki
• CME (coronal mass ejection): ?
• life: elämä
• universe: maailmankaikkeu

The answer to the meaning of life, the universe and everything sounds like Vastaus elämään, maailmankaikkeuteen ja kaikkeen muuhun sellaiseen in Finnish. But you could also say 42...
(If you have no idea about what I am talking: read the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy of Douglas Adams!)

By the way, mustikka means blueberry, not to be mistaken in French for "moustique", pronounced nearly the same, meaning 'mosquito'... (Thanks to Cyril to point it out!)

March 13: eating reindeer in Rovaniemi

In restaurant Zetor, I met already three other group members. On March 13, we took the bus together to the airport (which is located in Vantaa, a big city north of Helsinki). In the airport we met two other people, including Jari who is the organiser of the ESA seminar in Rovaniemi.

Rovaniemi from the air.

Rovaniemi is the administrative capital of Finland's most northern province, Lapland. It is located 5 km south of the arctic circle. You can reach it from Helsinki by plane or by train. And it is the official home of Santa Claus!
In the evening we went to eat in restaurant Nili, a typical Lappish restaurant. I have to admit that I ate poor Rudolph... I recommend you go there!

Part of our group in restaurant Nili

After the nice dinner, the bravest went outside to see the aurora from the river. It was the very first time that I saw it!

The first night in Rovaniemi we saw the northern light!
(Photo courtesy of Remco)

Facts & figures about Finland

The republic of Finland (Suomi in Finnish) is one of the 27 member states of the European Union. It was part of Sweden from the 12th until the 19th century, which explains why (besides Finnish) also Swedish is an official language (spoken by 5% of the population). In the north (Lapland) people speak also Sami.
Finnish is a Finnic language. Another well-known Finnic language is Estonian (and not Hungarian!). It is very unintelligible when you speak only Germanic and Romance languages... I found also a humoristic blog post about the Finnish language: http://linguistlist.org/blog/2013/04/finnish-origins-traced-back-to-klingon/

Its neighbour countries are Russia (in the east), Sweden (in the north) and Norway (more northerly).

It is a relatively young country: it became independent from Soviet Russia in 1917 (the October Revolution). After the second World War, it kept neutrality: it refused to ally with the Western countries or its communistic neighbour, the Soviet Union.

A map of Finland (source: Wikipedia)

Finland is more than 11 times bigger than Belgium. The number of inhabitants is about 5.5 million (Belgium: 11 million). This means that there are only 16 inhabitants/km² (Belgium: 355 inhabitants/km²). Most of the people live in the south of the country. According to Wikipedia, it is the most sparsely populated country in the European Union.

March 12: snow in Belgium

I had to wake up at 5 o'clock in the morning to catch my flight to Helsinki. It snowed about 10cm in Belgium, which is extremely rare for March. On March, 6 the maximum temperature was 19,5°C. The day before it started freezing again. The last time this happened in the second half of March was in 1925!
It was a tense morning. First I had to reach the airport. Fortunately the train was right on time! At the airport I was not so lucky: my flight was delayed by 45 minutes. On the other hand: it is also exciting to see that your plane is being deiced while you are already inside...

The distance Brussels-Helsinki is about 1600 km.
The Finnair flight does this distance in 2h30m.

In the afternoon I was invited by Cyril to visit the Finnish Meteorological Institute (or Ilmatieteen Laitos in Finnish). The main building is located in Helsinki, but they have four other premises. In total 680 people work at this institute, in research areas as Climate Change, Air Quality, Artic Research, ... Cyril works in the space research group. He investigates aurora, not only at Earth, but also at other planets in our solar system. A very interesting topic!

The weather radar at the FMI.

Afterwards I visited the Academic Bookstore (Akateeminen Kirjakauppa) at the Pohjoisesplanadi. This store is built by the famous Finnish architect Alver Aalto. It is probably the biggest bookstore in Scandinavia and the most cozy one for sure (with a nice bar at the top floor)! A must for book-lovers all over the world.

In the evening the first meeting with the other social media followers was planned in restaurant Zetor. A stricking fact is that the menu indicates which dishes have low lactose and are gluten-free. It seems that a lot of Finnish people have congenital lactase deficiency. That is a genetic disorder that makes it impossible to digest milk products. I ate the grilled salmon, and I can really recommend it!
After my lunch, I read in an online newspaper that there was that morning about 1600 km of traffic jams in Belgium. This is as much as the distance Brussels-Helsinki! Very impressive if you know that the largest distance between to borders is less than 300 km.

What is space weather?

The European Space Agency (ESA) uses the following definition for space weather:

Space weather refers to the environmental conditions in Earth's magnetosphere, ionosphere and thermosphere due to the Sun and the solar wind that can influence the functioning and reliability of spaceborne and ground-based systems and services or endanger property or human health.

What does it mean?
The Earth has a magnetic field, which can be shown with a compass. Outside the Earth, the magnetic field has the shape of a bullet, called the magnetosphere.

The shape of Earth's magnetosphere. (Image courtesy of ESA/NASA)

This shape is influenced by the magnetic field lines of the Sun and the solar wind (a stream of charged particles, mainly protons, expelled by the Sun). This makes the Sun the most important source of space weather. Other sources are the radiation belts (discovered by Van Allen in 1958) and cosmic particles.
As long as we stay on the ground, the magnetic field of the Earth protects us sufficiently against the radiation caused by these charged particles. But not so for astronauts in space or our modern technology, even on the ground.
Some of the effects are:

• Spacecraft anomalies (e.g. unexpected reboots)
• GPS signal disruption
• Ground induced currents (GIC) in electrical transmission lines, pipelines, ...

In 1859, a large solar storm (known as the Carrington event) caused a shutdown of the telegraph systems between Europe and North America.

But the most well-known effect of space weather is the aurora or northern lights.

Once upon a time...

...the European Space Agency (ESA) invited ten social media followers to take part in a day-long space weather science seminar in Rovaniemi, Finland. The event would include an evening of aurora viewing. So I clicked on the link hoping for the best but expecting nothing.

The message from ESA on Facebook

But a few days later (February 22) I received the following email from the ESOC (European Space Operations Centre, near Darmstadt) communications department:

Dear Stijn,

Thank you very much for registering for ESA's Space Weather Seminar, Rovaniemi, Finland, 14 March 2013.
On behalf of the Communication team at ESA, we are pleased to confirm your invitation and we look forward to seeing you in Finland!
You should plan your travel to arrive in Rovaniemi on 13 March and depart 15 March; our programme on 14 March will last the entire day.

From that moment on time was flying! I had to organise my trip to Finland in two weeks. There was already a plan to visit a friend, Cyril, who works since a few months at the Finish Meteorological Institute (FMI) in Helsinki. So maybe I could combine a visit of Helsinki with this space weather seminar in Rovaniemi?

Welcome to my blog!

I always keep a personal logbook of the travels to foreign countries. This time it was a special journey: I was one of ten ESA's social media followers that was invited to attend the Space Weather Seminar on March, 14  2013 in Rovaniemi, Finland. So I decided to publish my logbook on this blog.
At the end, I visited not only Rovaniemi (on the arctic circle) and Sodankylä, but also Helsinki and Tallinn (the capital of Estonia) during my one week (March 12-19) stay. It was a very beautiful journey in the on the most northern regions of Europe!

A view over Lapland from the airplane.

Information wants to be free: the texts on this blog can be reused for non-commercial purposes. The pictures are not always mine, so please ask permission before reusing them! Please let me know if you find errors.
English is not my mother tongue, but I hope that my English is better than your Dutch... ;-)