Black Spruce Forest

So those of you at P.17, I know you didn't get a chance to read through my last post with no internet at school today, but I hope you take a few minutes to find a way to check it while you are off the next two days. I will be back at school on Thursday, hopefully, if all my travel plans work out how they should. I will be extremely tired from traveling (I will be awake from around 7:30 am on Wednesday until Thursday night) but I will be very happy to see all of you again and to talk to you about my trip.

Anyway, let me fill you in on a little bit more of what we have been doing the past couple of days. Besides our day off and our tour of Churchill, we have been hard at work collecting data and gather samples of tree cores, seedlings, and saplings. We finished up at Rocket Lake with all of our assigned tasks, and moved on to a new site, the "Black Spruce Forest."  This site looks very different from our last site, with much denser forest, and many more larch and black spruce trees than at Rocket Lake. However, it is still similar in that it has the same three zones: the forest, the forest-tundra ecotone, and the tundra. We collected all of the seedlings and saplings in the forest-tundra and forest, and have moved on to collecting tree cores in the forest. We cored almost 60 trees (2 cores each = almost 120 core samples) before the end of the day, and we will continue tomorrow with taking cores from at least 50 trees in the forest-tundra.  It is going a lot faster since we are now experts at these tasks, and since you are probably familiar with them also, I won't take up any more of your time explaining what we were doing.

Besides working hard to collect data for Steve's research, we also spotted new wildlife on the way to and from the new site. On the way back to the Study Centre, we spotted an arctic fox out in the middle of the fen, probably looking for food in the tall vegetation. Its coat, which changes colors from brown in the summer to white in the winter, was already a creamy white color like the coat of the polar bears that we saw on Saturday. Unfortunately, we were all so tired from a long day working that nobody took a picture and we all just watched it from inside the van as we drove. Today, we also saw some birds that change colors in different seasons. These birds are called ptarmigans, and the first one we saw was still a dark gray color like they usually are in summer, while the other one way almost completely white, like they are in the winter.  We also passed several pieces of scientific equipment that belong to other scientists who are doing their own research in Churchill. It just serves to remind you how important places like Churchill are to studying the climate, and how strongly people believe that it will show the effects of changes to the climate.  Hopefully the work that we are doing this week will help the scientists studying climate change to understand better how the climate is changing, and to put the effects of this changing climate into better perspective.