We’re back! We had a busy two weeks at home in Seattle spent catching up on the rest of life and processing as much as we could from our May expedition in order to stay ahead of the game and, critically, to try to identify problems early so that we can correct them in June and July. Shelly has been busy with the several dozen cell counts she came home with (Spoiler: there are lots of cells in the ice!) and ordering stuff that we either ran out of, forgot to bring, or didn’t realize that we needed. I’ve been…
Posts Tagged «rotten-ice»
For me, back to the lab meant back to the walk-in freezer. Things went well all morning, but when we started back up after our cafeteria lunch (which included more of the fudge-like chocolate cake to which several of the team had become hopelessly addicted and which Bonnie described as “regrettably good”), things started to go south.As one particularly-beautiful-looking thin section was nearing completion, a spider crack suddenly formed halfway through a scrape and the whole thing fell apart. I sawed off a new piece and tried again, but again once the sample was close to completion, it cracked and…
On one of our last days, the lab staff invited us to a muktuk feast, which they had prepared from whale meat that Scotty, the lab mechanic, had from being part of a whaling crew. After a prayer of thanks, they told us what was what: first, traditional frozen, raw muktuk from the previous season: about an inch-thick piece of whale skin and blubber; second, a cooked version of the same from fresh meat from the whale just caught; third, steaks of whale tongue. We were given seasoning mix to flavor it, a traditional rounded ulu knife to cut it,…
It’s been a year of planning and preparation, ordering and organizing, testing and troubleshooting, but today we’re finally off to the Arctic!We’re all feeling pretty excited to be headed North to the ice. Shelly just got back from fieldwork in Greenland little over a month ago, but she’s buzzing and anxious about this busy trip (“Gaaaah just board the flight already!! How can people be sitting? Let’s GO!”). This is Karen’s first trip to Barrow since 2001 and she’s beaming like a kid. Bonnie is toting a shiny new spectrometer that arrived Friday after quite a bit of “is it…
We spent all day today unpacking our three pallets of coolers and boxes and cases, setting up the lab, and getting everything prepared for our first day out on the ice and the experiments after that. Carie was relieved that the fancy and expensive microscope seemed none the worse for the wear after its long trip up here and that the little sensor spots she had last-minute shipped from Germany made it in on time. Monica and Karen spent the day gluing said sensor spots into little glass vials while Shelly and Julianne tag-teamed getting the whole mess sorted into…
As we begin Day 7 of our trip up here to Barrow, Carie has officially declared that “Super Fantastic Science Has Happened!”While Carie is busy in the cold room chopping up ice cores, microtoming them into thin sections and inspecting them under the microscope, keeping meticulous notes, setting up cell incubations, consulting with the PIs, videotaping the team for science outreach, singing songs to stay warm, etc. she has had barely any time to keep up with the blog. Well, almost no time. As you’ll see shortly, her thoughts are interspersed throughout this post as well. Until Carie can fully take…
Field days are what we all look forward to most, but most of our time in Barrow (and in general) is necessarily spent in the lab. Cores and other samples acquired the day before on the Chukchi Sea, it was time to buckle down and process everything. We had been in the lab until almost 2 am the night before, but there was still much to be done, and we scattered into the lab and various walk-in freezers and coldrooms.It all starts in the walk-in freezer, which I had set to -15°C, nice and frozen, with the fans blowing cold…
Bonnie and I went out today to do some optics measurements at a location close to the sampling site on the Chukchi Sea. We also recruited the BARC Senior Scientist, Karl Newyear, to help us out.Bonnie wanted to measure the following: the relative amount of sunlight reflected by the snow (albedo), the relative amount of sunlight transmitted through the snow and ice at the bottom of the sea ice (light transmittance), and the amount of sunlight that passes through the snow and ice at regular intervals down a core hole (vertical light profile).In the photo above, you can see the spectrophotometer…
After all the time cooped up working hard in the lab, another field day was a literal breath of fresh air. But first we had to wait over an hour for our bear guard, who had slept through his alarm because he was out partying the night before because a large female bowhead whale had been caught by one of the local native whaling crews. We passed the time by packing up the sled, telling field stories, and taking increasingly silly photos.We were so anxious to get out on the ice when he finally did arrive, that we didn’t discuss…