Thermokarst Sampling!

I went out with Sarah again this past Tuesday to help her with thermokarst sampling up the Toolik inlet. She has several stations set up to monitor temperature at various depths. It is impressive how cold it gets just beneath the surface of the tundra! We did some digging to bury new sensors and to bury all of the excess cords. Sarah hopes to leave the sensors out logging over winter, so we were attempting to reduce the amount of machinery above ground that wildlife may take interest in. To the left is the above ground portion of one of her temperature logging stations.

It was fun to dig through the tundra and see the soil horizons. The tundra we were digging in is pretty old, so it has strongly developed soil horizons with marked changes in color. Dan would call this one of my dork out moments, but they are really pretty looking!


While out we also measured frost depth along 3 transects as well as soil moisture, conductivity, and temperature. We visited the ISCO water sampler (a machine that automatically samples water at a set time interval, picture, left) to acidify some of the water samples and check to ensure the machine was okay. Apparently the bears really have an affinity for the ISCOs for some odd reason often destroy them!

After we returned home, I headed up the boardwalk to collect rain samples. The past few weeks the dragon flies have come out in abundance on that hill. They tend to perch along the boardwalk!

Thermokarst and Christmas!

So this has been a big week in terms of social activities here at Toolik! We celebrated Christmas a couple of days ago on July 25th! Leading up to Christmas was the ABC party (anything but clothes). The idea was to create an outfit out of found items. One of my friends, Shilo put together an amazing trash bag dress, complete with duct tape corset. She came over to the lab before the party to convince me to go and helped me put together a bench paper dress!
The 25th of July was Christmas. Everyone who wanted to participate put their names in a box for Secret Santa! We all made gifts out of found objects for the other person. It was pretty impressive how creative some people were! Examples of gifts included a moose attack survival kit, river dioramas, a puppy constructed out of cardboard tubes and springs, and even a sheep made from real sheep's fur! The person I was making my present for is really into puns so I did an online search for puns and collaged a 1-L square water bottle (which was really a washed out sample collection bottle) with all of the best (and worst!) puns that I found. I also added a couple of really funny cartoons. My favorite was an xkcd cartoon about the purity of sciences:

(from http://xkcd.com/435/)

I was pretty proud of how it turned out. Dan even dressed up as the grinch/santa and Scotty (one of the camp staff members) made a Christmas tree out of the midget willow branches!
I have a feeling this week was kind of like spring/winter weekend at Smith... or rather the calm before the storm! We are about to hit crunch period in the next few weeks. i can't believe I only have a month here left ...

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Just so you all don't think that we are only partying around here, I felt the need to post about the thermokarst site where I helped Sarah measure thaw depth, soil moisture, and soil conductivity along 4 transects. Thermokarst refers to land features (commonly slumps, fractures, and other land failures) that occur due to the melting of permafrost (frozen ground). Measuring thaw depth basically requires pushing a large pole down into the tundra until it hits the permafrost. The problem is that the pole often hits rocks or gravel before it reaches the permafrost. Although the reverberation of the pole against rocks is significantly different than the pole hitting the frozen ground, it is often difficult to find points without rocks.
So much of the permafrost had melted out at one part of the land failure caused a large cave to form. Ice was actually exposed on the back wall and the overhang was almost solely supported by roots from the tundra plants and grasses!