As we mentioned in our previous news, the first scientists have finally arrived at the station. Thanks to our professional team at PEA, everything has gone well and the scientists have now headed out into the field to start their research.
In addition to preparing the Perseus Airstrip for the plane carrying the scientists from Cape Town, the BELARE team prepared the living containers and mobile power units that the scientists from MASS2ANT and the CLIMB projects have been using on their journey to the coast. While the CLIMB project team has already returned to PEA, the MASS2ANT team has started their weeks-long field research at the coast.
Keeping up the Princess
A lot of work goes into preparing the station for the arrival of the scientists and to keep it running as maximum efficiency.
One of the first things the team needs to do each season is to adjust the levels of the north and south annexes of the station, which sit on a slowly moving glacier. The hinge system the team installed a few seasons ago for the two annexes to rest upon make it easy to make adjustments. This needs to be done twice a year - once when the opening team arrives at the beginning of the season, and once again before the last members of the team close the station down for the winter. Glaciers move faster than you think (about 9 cm per year in that location)!
And of course the renewable energy systems need to be maintained. After enduring a punishing austral winter, the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica always needs to undergo routine maintenance to help keep it working properly as a comfortable and eco-friendly research station.
Guus Luppens, Johan Demuylder, and Paul Herman have been busy changing a few solar panels that were damaged during the winter with the latest generation double sided panels. The team also checked and maintained all nine of the wind turbines installed on Utsteinen Ridge that provide the station with wind power. After surviving strong winds all winter, they are working perfectly. The station is producing a lot of renewable energy from the sun and the wind. These two sources of energy are complementary and can supply the station each on their own when conditions are optimal for one or the other. When the sun and the wind work together, the station produces more energy than it needs to function. This surplus is used to heat up workshops and garages, and allows the engineers to consider new types of energy storage and new types of energy sources for eco-friendly vehicles and technologies that are currently under development.
The entire electrical system for the south annex - which the team has been building over the least two seasons and which holds new additional living quarters, the station’s snow melter, storage areas, and the new surgery room - has now been completed. The team installed a new building control system, which is usually used in large facilities such as hospitals, airports, etc. It allows flexible electrical control of the building.
The renewable energy that the station and the team uses is controlled and managed by a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) circuit. The PLC is the brain of the station that manages all electricity production at the station and prioritises its use depending on a predefined hierarchy of user priorities. However, after 12 years of service, it was time for a hardware upgrade to the latest available technologies. Station engineers Wouter Paesen, Nicolas Herinckx, and Wouter Verscheure have been installing the new hardware, provided by station partner Schneider Electric. Energy management at the station will become even more reliable thanks to these latest upgrades!
The Princess gets a zero-emission friend
With all of this well-managed renewable energy produced, it’s possible to use that extra energy to heat up the non-residential areas of the station like the garage - or to charge vehicles, such as the new addition to the station’s fleet of vehicles, the Venturi Antarctica, the world’s first electric polar exploration vehicle. A team from Venturi - a Monegasque company that produces high-performance electric vehicles - arrived on the same flight as the scientists with the new vehicle to field test it in Antarctica.
Since December 10th, the Venturi team has been testing the amazing new addition to PEA’s fleet of vehicles. Able to carry up to six people and equipment, and function in temperatures as low as -50°C, the electric vehicle can travel up to 60 km on a single charge, and can even carry an extra battery to extend this range.
The scientists at the station are already taking advantage of the new vehicle. The Venturi Antarctica has supported field training exercises for scientists as well as a field expedition for the CLIMB project as they went to the Antarctic Plateau to collect samples from their atmospheric particle sampling units.
Now is the time to focus on the development of new technologies to enable us to further reduce the carbon footprint of conducting research in the polar regions and everywhere else on Earth!
Since December 10th, the BELARE team at the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica - the world’s first zero-emission polar research station - has been hosting a team from the Monegasque company Venturi, which manufactures high-performance electric vehicles, to test the world’s first electric polar exploration vehicle, the Venturi Antarctica.
The entire team is excited to be field testing a zero-emission vehicle charged with renewable energy produced by the PEA station. The Venturi Antarctica allows scientists to further reduce the carbon footprint of carrying out research when they use it to go on field expeditions.
During its first week in operation, the groundbreaking vehicle has carried out missions to support the work of scientific research programmes, including conducting maintenance work on a number of automated weather observation stations and the new Belgian atmospheric observation station on the Antarctic Plateau at an altitude of 2,300 metres. During its journey in the field, the team took snow surface temperature measurements in-situ in order to validate the same measurements taken via satellite.
The Venturi Antarctica also took part in a simulated safety field training exercise to rescue someone who was trapped at the bottom of a crevasse, demonstrating its use as a multi-purpose transport vehicle.
With bench seats that can fold down, the vehicle is able to transport up to six people, equipment, and even a second battery to extend its range of 50 to 200 kilometres. It is designed to operate in temperatures as low as -50°C.
The groundbreaking electric vehicle will become part of the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica’s fleet, helping to further reduce the carbon footprint of conducting research in Antarctica
You can read more about this world first in a press release issued on Friday December 17th.
The first teams of scientist arrived at Perseus Airstrip last Thursday after a transcontinental flight from Cape Town, South Africa to Antarctica, and they’re already preparing for their first field campaigns.
It already feels a lot more active at the station now that eight scientists from three research projects have arrived. As the Perseus Airstrip eliminates the need to charter a second connector flight once scientists arrive in Antarctica, the team from PEA that drove to the airstrip to groom it nearly two weeks in advance of the plane’s landing brought the scientists and their equipment back to PEA in modified Toyota Hiluxes equipped with caterpillar tracks.
Into the field!
Following two days of mandatory safety training in which all scientists learn (or review for those who are returning to PEA) the basics of surviving in Antarctica: how to handle emergency situations they may encounter, how to use a skidoo, how to use a GPS in the field, and how to extract someone from a crevasse), the scientists started preparing the equipment for their respective field expeditions.
MASS2ANT
A team from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) led by glaciologist Dr. Frank Pattyn will leave at the end of this week for a three-week stay at the Princess Ragnhild Coast nearly 200 km from PEA to revisit the ice rises their team sampled a few seasons ago as part of the BELSPO-funded MASS2ANT project. As you might recall, during the 2018-2019 reach season, the MASS2ANT team extracted a record 260-metre ice core from that ice rise at coast. The project seeks to better understand the surface mass balance in the region (how much new ice is added to the surface of the ice sheet though precipitation versus how much is lost to calving and ablation).
While they’ll revisit the 260-metre borehole this season to take some extra measurements around it, the MASS2ANT team will only take short ice cores a few meters deep every 50km towards the coast, along with snow samples every 2.5km from the PEA Station to their field camp at the coast. The team will also take ground penetrating radar (GPR) measurements across the whole ice rise, extract a 15 metre-deep shallow core at the corner of the grid. They'll document near surface firn measurements (top 1 metre) at several locations around the ice rise (including radar tracks) and take Polarimetric pRES measurements. This year they’re going to use the shallow ice cores they drill to learn more about snow accumulation over the past few years, and how it varies over the ~200 km transect.
CLIMB
Since their arrival at the station, Preben Van Overmeiren from Ghent University and his colleague Andy Delcloo from the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium (KMI / IRM) have been installing and maintaining instruments installed on the roof of the station and the two scientific shelters located nearby on Utsteinen Ridge. Working on the BELSPO-financed CLIMB project their data allow to study many parameters of the atmosphere state and composition.
On Wednesday, Preben already had the opportunity to make day trips to the Antarctic Plateau to perform maintenance and collect the first samples from an active volatile organic compound sampler installed last year and powered by solar panels and a wind turbine. Later on this week, Preben and Andy will join the MASS2ANT team as they head to the coast for their field work. The CLIMB project transect lies along the same transect in which the MASS2ANT team will take samples as they head to the coast.
PEACE
Rounding out the new group of scientists are Simon Steffen (the late Prof. Koni Steffen’s son) and Derek Houtz from the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL) who are working in partnership with the IPF and the University of Colorado Boulder on the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica Climate Experiment (PEACE) project. The project focuses on the collection of meteorological data (wind speed, wind direction, temperature, relative humidity etc. at different level from the ground) along a south-north transect, from the Antarctic Plateau to the lower slope of the ice shelf near the coast.
The ACME project led by the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium (KMI / IRM), which is collecting atmospheric data using radio sounding weather balloons, is contributing to the PEACE project, along with the data collected by Automated Weather Station (AWS) in the vicinity of the station.
DOME FUJI
Besides these scientific projects, Expedition Leader Alain Hubert is preparing for a trip to Dome Fuji on the Antarctic Plateau in the framework of a longstanding collaboration between IPF and the Japanese Nataional Insitute for Polar Resaerch (NIPR). This traverse will use tractors from PEA to make the traverse to Dome Fuji, which sits at an altitude of 3800 metres, 880 km from PEA.
Four loaded sledges of fuel had been already been transported 130 km from PEA along the rute during the 2019-20 season in preparation for this traverse. The objective of the mission is to carry out 200 drums of fuel for the future deep ice core drilling mission the NIPR is planning in the coming years. On the return journey to PEA, the team will carry out a number of scientific measurements.
Now inhabited by 40 people, the station will feel a bit less occupied once the scientists head out into the field.
This year symposium's successful hybrid format allowed many people from around the world to engage in interesting discussions both online and in-person.
The 2021 Arctic Futures Symposium finished just a few days ago. In spite of the challenging COVID situation, this year's Arctic Futures Symposium went ahead as planned as a hybrid event. This format allowed us to meet many of the "usual suspects" from the Arctic stakeholders and many new faces in-person in Brussels again, this time at the Martin's Brussels EU Hotel. Those unable to travel to actively participate in the symposium online could conenct via Zoom. Despite this challenging situation, the event went very well and we’ve received a lot of positive feedback.
The International Polar Foundation would like to thank all of the moderators and speakers for generously giving their time to take part in the symposium and to the partners for their help in helping us put together the interesting and diverse panels on topics relevant to Arctic stakeholders. Special thanks goes to our on-site preparation team for ensuring that the event ran smoothly.
nsform:none;white-space:normal;widows:2;word-spacing:0px;"> On Monday 6 December we had a chance to listen to three panel discussions on Arctic Governance led by Arne Holm (Editor-in-Chief of High North News), Romain Chuffart (Fellow at The Arctic Institute), and Marie-Anne Coninsx (Former EU Ambassador at Large for the Arctic).
The second day of the symposium addressed Arctic youth, demographics and capacity-Building, Arctic resilience, and the Arctic as a more sustainable place to do business. The moderators of these panels - Sveinung Eikeland (Vice Rector of UiT i the Arctic University of Norway) Mike Sfraga (Chair of U.S. Arctic Research Commission and Director of the Wilson Center Polar Institute), and Mads Qvist Frederiksen (Director of the Arctic Economic Council) led diverse panels with speakes who discussed the challenges and opportunities they face in their everyday lives.
All these contributions made this year's symposium so special. Videos of each of the panels and a summary of the main points discussed during the symposium will be soon posted on the IPF YouTube Channel for those of you who missed the event.
In the meantime, mark your calendars for the 3rd Arctic Shorts film evening, which will take place on Wednesday 26 January at BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels city centre (sanitary conditiosn permitting). We will post more details about how to sign up for this on the Arctic Futures website in the coming weeks.
If you are interested in learning more, please contact us at events@polarfoundation.org .
The gorgeous weather we had these past few weeks finally came to an end. For two days we we visited by a mighty snowstorm. The storm left us with a lot of work to remove snow from the terrace and grooming it. In addition to dealing with routine things like snow removal, we've been up to much more exciting things.
Our whole team completed the necessary medical field training to handle emergency situations. It was a good preparation for our upcoming mission to prepare the Perseus Airstrip for the arrival of the first scientists of the season. The airstrip is located just 60 km north of the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica. Before any plane can land on it, it must be well groomed and we have to make sure the infrastructure is up to speed.
Six members of the team went on the expedition, leaving the rest of us at the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica. For those us who stayed behind, it was a quiet, but productive week. We installed the scientists’ new workshop and partitioned the room for to store new field equipment. We also started up the wastewater treatment system and almost completed maintenance on the wind turbines.
All of this work aroudn the staiton was necesary as the arrival of the scientsits and new team mebmers is approaching. Even as we temporarily got used to having a smaller team at the station, we know that we have to prepare ourselves for our numbers to triple in the coming days.
While making preparations, we learned from our colleagues at the Perseus Airstrip that the anticipated arrival of the scientsits had been moved from December 7th to December 9th due to bad weather conditions. The weather has been getting worse and worse lately, so this is not surprising at all! A massive amount of snow piled up in the station's garage, making it difficult to level it off, as we have to do each season.
We can't wait to see what the next week will bring!
We’re delighted to announce that following last year’s online event, this year’s symposium will be held as a hybrid event that will allow us to meet both digitally and in person in Brussels on December 6th and 7th!
As it does every year, the Arctic Futures Symposium will assemble a wide variety of stakeholders, including local, regional, national and EU policymakers, Arctic indigenous peoples, entrepreneurs and representatives from the business sector, natural and social scientists, and others with interests in the Arctic.
This year's symposium will be held as a series of webinars over two successive days starting at 1 pm Central European Time (GMT+1) or 7:00 am Eastern Standard Time (GMT-5) on the 6th of December and continuing at 1:30 pm CET or 7:30 am Eastern Standard Time (GMT-5) on the 7th of December. The physical event will befor a limited number of people at Martin's Brussels EU, located at Boulevard Charlemagne / Karel de Grootstraat 80, 1000 Brussels.
As registrations to attend the event in-person are limited, we encourage everyone to follow the event online. The webinar access link will be sent directly to the participants who have registered, so don’t forget to register!
For those unable to regsiter, it will be possible to follow the symposium live streamed on the International Polar Foundation's YouTube Channel.
Programme Outline
The symposium will feature panel discussions that cover a number of key topics and challenges chosen by Arctic stakeholder partners including:
All are welcome
Everyone who is interested in what is happening in the Arctic region - be they politicians, diplomats, civil servants, academics, indigenous peoples, representatives from the private sector, representatives of civil society, teachers, students, or members of the general public - are more than welcome to register and take part in the discussions.
For more details about the symposium programme, speakers, and registration, please consult the Arctic Futures Symposium website.
If you have any additional questions about the symposium, you are welcome to contact us at events@polarfoundation.org or at +32 (0)2 520 34 40, and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
We look forward to seeing you online next Monday and Tuesday!
We are all settling in nicely to life at the station as we work hard to make sure everything is in order for the arrival of the first group of scientists in a few weeks’ time. We’ve been lucky to have gorgeous weather these last few weeks. It has allowed us to make a lot of progress.
Settling in
We are all settling in nicely to life at the station as we work hard to make sure everything is in order for the arrival of the first group of scientists in a few weeks’ time. We’ve been lucky to have gorgeous weather these last few weeks. It has allowed us to make a lot of progress.
Over the past week, we’ve been able to start up scientific instruments at the station and in the shelters nearby that collect data of all kinds of phenomena including cloud particle formation, UV radiation, and geomagnetic and seismic activity. Benoît Verdin has started the daily launch of weather balloons that collect weather data that contribute to regional weather forecasting and climate modelling, and not to mention the Year of Polar Prediction (YOPP).
We have also been doing regular maintenance checks on the station’s systems and making improvements whenever possible. We are making progress with the annual checkup of the station’s nine wind turbines, and performed maintenance on the station’s ventilation system, which has raised the humidity levels indoors to more comfortable levels. Antarctica is a cold desert with hardly any relative humidity. Sometimes the dryness can be uncomfortable.
Favourable weather conditions have made possible for PEA to produce excess energy, which is “dumped” into heating resistors in the annexes where the workshops and garages are located, making them nice and warm places for the mechanics to practice their trade. Although we have not needed them, we have also been doing general maintenance on the station’s backup generators (the gensets).
Preparing for the scientists’ arrival
In their warm and cozy garage the mechanics have been busy working on general maintenance of the skidoo fleet and vehicles leaving for Perseus Airfield 60 km north from the station.
We have been preparing living containers to support a six-person party who will spend ten days at Perseus Airfield to prepare the landing strip for the arrival of the Ilyushin-76 carrying the first team of scientists directly from Cape Town. The landing is scheduled on December 7th. The BELARE team built Perseus Airfield a few years ago to allow direct transcontinental flights, reducing the cost of transporting scientists and equipment from South Africa to PEA in a shorter amount of time.
Due to the constant flow of the ice sheet and accumulation of fresh snow, airfields in Antarctica need to be well maintained before planes can land on them. The party heading out to the airfield will make the runway perfect for welcoming the first teams of scientists!
Safe tracks have been prepared and mapped out leading to and from the station in all directions. This is a mandatory procedure to ensure that teams have a safe route to follow whether they are travelling close to the station or heading out into the field. But we are also mapping out tracks in our minds to prepare for the adventure that lies ahead for us this season.
The 2021-2022 season has begun for the Belgian Antarctic Research Expedition (BELARE) team at the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica research station!
On November 2nd, after a mandatory quarantine in Cape Town, South Africa, the first 14 members of the 2021-2022 BELARE team arrived at the Princess Elisabeth to open the station a few weeks ahead of the arrival of the first scientists of the season. After eight months of lying dormant, PEA was happy to welcome back many familiar faces and several new ones!
After a few days, the team had cleared away the excess snow that had accumulated during the winter and started up the station's systems, which are once again running on 100% renewable wind and solar energy, as they have every season since the station was completed in 2009. The team will make sure everything is ready for the arrival of the first group of scientists in early December.
You can follow the adventures of the BELARE team and all of the scientists and visitors to the station this season on the website dedicated to the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica.
The Princess Elisabeth Antarctica station (PEA) is up and running for the 2021-2022 season!
After a quarantine in Cape Town and the usual PCR tests to punctuate our days, the Belgian Antarctic Research Expedition or BELARE (which rhymes with “volare”) departed for Antarctica on November 2nd. It was early in the morning when we left our hotel, and the sun was rising behind Eagle’s Nest, the mini peak next to Houtkapperspoort, where we were staying. There were 14 of us to take the Ilyushin. All of the expedition members for this first flight were crew members, tasked to open up the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica Station and to deal with any technical issues before the arrival of the scientists.
This is another COVID year. We hoped there wont be any more, because it really messes things up and means that you end up spending much longer in Cape Town, and have to factor this quarantine into planning.
The Expedition Leader is Alain Hubert. There is also systems team Benoît, Timothée and Nicolas; the doctor, Barbara; the Water Loop guys Bernard and Paul; the building maintenance and construction team, young Tom and French Thomas; the cook, another French Thomas; the Vehicle Ops team Pierre, Tim, and Yann; and Jacques, the snow machine operator from Québec. Nicknames will soon become essential….
Arriving on an Ilyushin Il-76 at the airfield of Novolazarevskaya Station (Novo Air Base) the team is rapidly shuttled towards the DC-3 feeder flight with their baggage. The journey to PEA is 450km, and it takes about one and a half hours. The DC3 isn’t so fast, but then you have to remember that it dates back to the early 1940s! We landed on the ungroomed airstrip around 8 pm. We had to leave most of the cargo at Novo to be brought to the station via a separate feeder flight the following day.
The BELARE team members used skidoos and sledges dug out of the containers next to the airstrip to cover the last 2 km to the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica.
The weather stayed clement, making for a gentle introduction to Antarctica for the newbies. There was no wind at Novo, which someone said was the exception. But it is now the Antarctic summer, so maybe it’s normal.
The crew arrived at the station and immediately set about with the first visual checks to identify any issues that might have occurred during the station’s long winter sleep. Temperatures inside had dropped to -25 °C during the winter.
The engineers run diagnostics to study any mechanical or electrical failures. Everything is an opportunity to learn and it is fascinating. Despite the extreme cold during the winter, there was no significant damage beyond a few extra deeply frozen food items. The backup generators were started up and ran the station for a short time, giving the power needed to dry out the technical parts of the station and restart the most critical station functions: water production, light, heating, and cooking. A guy’s gotta eat!
The gradual heating of the station back to normal temperatures was necessary to get the remaining electrical systems and batteries back up. In no time, the station was running on 100% renewables again.
Timothée, down in Antarctica for the first time, explains:
“As we continued to start up PEA’s systems (smart grid, water production and distribution, ventilation, water treatment, and communications), we also began the important annual task of clearing the snow from the station to free access to the garages and create a flat, ordered area in front of the station where we can park the scientific equipment, field containers and vehicles. This year we benefited from excellent weather conditions: lots of sun and little wind.”
All of the station’s essential systems had been successfully started by the end of the first week. The whole team is doing well and preparing for the coming weeks, which will be dedicated to carrying out general maintenance and improvements of the station and its systems before the arrival of the first scientists on December 7th.
The mood is good and it is really exciting to be in such an amazing place - not only in terms of the natural environment, but also in this station that looks like as it has just landed from an interstellar trip.
Beam me up, Scotty!
Thanks to the financial support of the Québec Government Office in Brussels, IPF has released a new animated videos created with the help of Zest Studio in La Hulpe, Belgium, focusing on biodiversity - just in time for COP26!
The four-minute animation is available in English, French and Dutch on IPF’s YouTube Channel.
The animated videos focuses on safeguarding biodiversity as an essential part of maintaining all life on Earth, and also addresses the adverse impacts human activity has had on biodiversity, such as unsustainable farming and fishing practices.
The video ends with a list of actions we can all take to reduce our impact on ecosystems and help preserve biodiversity and become a climate hero.
Educators in particular will may find the videos useful for introducing their students to the concepts of biodiversity and sustainability in their lesson planning.
If you would like to learn more about IPF's educational and outreach activities, please feel free to contact us at education@polarfoundation.org !
The latest edition of the annual Arctic Futures Symposium organised by the International Polar Foundation and its many Arctic stakeholder partners will take place in early December. Register to secure your spot!
IPF is sad to learn of the passing of glaciologist Professor Roland Souchez, who made important contributions to the fields of glaciology and climate science during his decades-long career.
To celebrate the opening of the exhibit “To the Antarctic: Belgica’s Polar Pioneers”, Antwerp resident and LEGO enthusiast Daniel Vermeir built an amazing scale model of the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica, the world’s first and to date only zero-emission polar research station.
To celebrate the opening of the exhibit “To the Antarctic: Belgica’s Polar Pioneers”, Antwerp resident and LEGO enthusiast Daniel Vermeir built an amazing scale model of the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica, the world’s first and to date only zero-emission polar research station.
The International Polar Foundation has been part of creating a fascinating new exhibition on Belgium's contributions to Antarctic exploration and research, opening at the MAS Museum in Antwerp starting from Friday, June 21st.
After much anticipation, on Thursday, June 20th, the exhibition “To the Antarctic: Belgica’s Polar Pioneers” at Antwerp’s MAS Museum officially opened its doors.
On Tuesday, June 11th, IPF Founder and President Alain Hubert was invited to participate in the “Debate with Ambassadors” panel at European Sustainable Energy Week 2024 (EUSEW24).
At a ceremony held the afternoon of Monday, June 10th at The Royal Academy of Sciences of Belgium, Alain Hubert, Founder and President of the International Polar Foundation, received the prestigious Belgica Prize alongside French glaciologist Professor Jérôme Chappellaz.
At a ceremony held the afternoon of Monday, June 10th at The Royal Academy of Sciences of Belgium, Alain Hubert, Founder and President of the International Polar Foundation, received the prestigious Belgica Prize alongside French glaciologist Professor Jérôme Chappellaz.
Alain Hubert, Founder and President of the International Polar Foundation, is set to receive the Belgica Prize at a ceremony to be held at the Royal Academy for Sciences and the Arts of Belgium the afternoon of Monday, June 10th, alongside French glaciologist Dr Jérôme Chappellaz.
Alain Hubert, Founder and President of the International Polar Foundation, is set to receive the Belgica Prize at a ceremony to be held at the Royal Academy for Sciences and the Arts of Belgium the afternoon of Monday, June 10th, alongside French glaciologist Dr Jérôme Chappellaz.
For the 3rd year in a row, entrepreneurs 35 or under based in the Arctic are invited to submit an application for the annual Laurence Trân Arctic Futures Award.
The International Polar Foundation and its many Arctic stakeholder partners are happy to announce that the 15th annual Arctic Futures Symposium will take place on December 2nd-3rd at the Residence Palace in Brussels.
