Lauritz Sømme has made shorter trips to several places in the world to study arthropods' cold tolerance, including the Atlas Mountains and Mount Kenya in Africa. He has also spent time on Svalbard since 1988, where he helped determine that some animals can become desiccated in the fall. When the cold weather comes, they have so little water in their bodies that they survive until the spring without frost damage, and then in the spring the body's fluid content increases again. This strategy is used by some potworms and the Arctic springtail Onychiurus arcticus.