Tuesday September 23, 2008

It's a gray morning but most of the team is up Skyping or working on their blogs. We are all waiting for breakfast to get that first cup of coffee. Today will be the real test of all the skills we learned yesterday. We will go out to one of their sites and start doing the real work. 

Before we go, we meet to go over the tasks and gather the equipment. As we will be out all morning, we have to prepare for the weather. While it is just cloudy now, it is cold and the chance of rain exists. I was ready. I had on long johns, fleece pants and shirt. I put on ski pants and rain pants, along with my rain boots with sock liners and heavy socks. Next, I had my ski jacket with the lining, scarf, hat and gloves. 

We drove to the site and had to walk in. The route was rocky at first and then the ground turned soft. They call it peat. There we divided up into groups and began our work.

The picture above is of my team for the day. They include Anna Janovicz, Earthwatch Corporate Fellows Manager, Linda Santoro, a teacher from Connecticut and your teacher, Ms. Gill.

Our first job was to test soil samples across a grid or transect line (which is one line of a grid) which is an area of research. 

We had to dig 10 holes and one pit. This was multiplied by three as we did this across a forest section, forest-tundra section, and the tundra. At each spot, we measured the depth of the soil to rock with a probe, and with a shovel we measured the sediment to rock. Then we dug a pit. Here we looked more carefully at the different layers of soil and did a few experiments.

We took turns doing the various jobs. My first one was digging the holes in the forest area. The holes there were deep and required maneuvering around trees.  Because the ground was uneven, it was difficult to find a level place to stand. The weather all this time was brisk but invigorating. in fact, I was quite warm with all my clothes and had to unzip a few layers. We managed to finish two areas before lunch. Everyone, including myself, was glad to head back and eat.

 The food here is great as is the company. I sat next to a polar bear researcher at lunch. her work begins in October. She works with polar bear babies who have lost their parent and need to be reattached to another bear. She told me that when they return polar bears to the wild they sedate them. Their bodies are paralyzed but the bears are still awake. They are then flown on helicopters back to wilderness areas.

In the afternoon, we returned to the site and finished our soil survey in the tundra area. The soil was not very deep and we hit rock quickly. We then joined another group to do tree boring. We had to do measurements of height, diameter, branches, whether a tree was dead, reduced (not healthy) or alive. We looked at the seed, bed under the tree and the various growth plants on the ground and different heights around it. The tree borer looks like a cork screw and we took samples from the tree at ground level and chest height. While we were doing this, it began to pour rain and we quickly were soaking wet. The rain was steady for over an hour. Those of us in the forest were protected from the heaviest downpours, but the group working in the tundra had to deal with large wind blasts off  Rocket Lake.

We returned to the base, cleaned all our instruments, and entered the data on spreadsheets on the computer.

The classroom where we worked looked like a giant laundry mat as we had all our wet clothes scattered over chairs and tables to dry.

One item we found all over the area we worked in was "SCAT". Do you know what that is? 

Other vocabulary words for you are: TUNDRA, FOREST, PH LEVEL, ORGANIC MATTER, PERMAFROST.

 

Here is a picture of "SCAT". We think it belongs to the Canadian geese who love to eat all the berries we found.

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