Think Globally, Act Locally

Today we are winding down, cleaning up, organizing our work, and creating an original expedition song! We gathered and processed over 200 soil samples and about 500 seedlings and saplings. Dr. Kershaw will share some preliminary findings at his last presentation right before we leave.

So what, now what?
What a wonderful world we live in. Our Earth has so many beautiful sites and since this is the only home we have we need to be aware of our impact and what the future will hold.
An increasing body of observations gives a collective picture of a warming world and other changes in the climate system. I was a small part of a project in a long term study of climate change at the Arctic’s edge. Dr. Kershaw’s research on the Arctic environment provides important data to understand the implications of climate change for natural and human systems. Now it’s time I share what I learned with others. Upon returning I will be getting with students and teachers and we will be deciding on a community project for local action.

Meanwhile I encourage anyone with questions or ideas to please contact me at kathy_price@bsin.k12.nm.us. My next blog entry will be an update on my follow on project.

**Extra, Extra** – as we left the field yesterday to return to the Center we saw a red fox, two bald eagles, beluga whales and another Polar Bear climbing down the rocks to take a swim in Hudson Bay plus another wonderful night show of the Northern Lights. WOW!

The Wonders of Wildlife

Questions for the curious:

Why don't Polar Bears eat much in the summer? What does the term "beluga" mean? How are Grey wolves different from Arctic wolves?

We woke up this morning to view a big grey wolf outside our bedroom window, trotting across the parking lot, then stopping and looking toward us as we made a made scramble to try to get our cameras. He/she wasn’t willing to wait and trotted off into the surrounding rocks and willows. To see more pictures and even hear what they sound like check out the sites below.

http://www.defenders.org/wildlife_and_habitat/wildlife/wolf,_gray.php
http://www.thewildones.org/Animals/grayWolf.html

The day just got better. We loaded up in a small tour bus with our tour guide Paul and had a fantastic day. YES, WE SAW POLAR BEARS! In fact we saw three of them! One walking across the tundra and two on rocks near the coast of Hudson Bay. Paul said the one lying closest to us could reach us in 5 seconds if he ran so we had to stay near the bus and not get closer. These bears grow their entire life and can get up to 1500 lbs. The ones we saw looked pretty big! Polar bears are the world's largest land predators. They top the food chain in the Arctic, where they prey primarily on seals. What I thought was interesting is that they hardly eat anything in the summer and sleep for about 80% of the day.

Can you imagine a job where you get up in the morning, jump into a helicopter and fly over arctic terrain looking for polar bears? When you find one you shoot a sleeping dart into them, land and then attach a GPS satellite collar on them, tag them, weigh them and then go and look for another? That is what Dr. Nick Lunn is doing daily at the CNSC while we are here. During breakfast today we told me yesterday he tagged 10 bears. Back at the University of Alberta graduate students gather and track the data on the location of the bears about every 4 days. They are wanting to see their travel paths and when they venture out onto the ice in Hudson Bay.

The main threat to polar bears today is the loss of their icy habitat due to climate change. Polar bears depend on the sea ice for hunting, breeding, and in some cases to den. The summer ice loss in the Arctic is now equal to an area the size of Alaska, Texas, and the state of Washington combined.

Watch this cool music videos of polar bears and then visit the home site which has a lot of interesting things to find out.
http://polarbearsinternational.org/photo-and-video-gallery/music-videos/
http://www.polarbearsinternational.org/

We also saw bald eagles, sand cranes, snow geese, several more species of birds, three baby red foxes, and about 75 Canadian Eskimo dogs as we drove around. But was was really great was seeing a large number of Beluga Whales. I found out Beluga is the Russian word for “white” and they are the “white bears of the sea”. The whales looked like white blobs coming out of the ocean, and we were close enough to even see their blow holes and 7 or 8 at any one time coming out of the water.

The weather was beautiful, no rain, no bugs, and not too cold nor too hot…just right for a great day off!
Tomorrow I’ll post more pictures, meanwhile here are a few thanks to Joe Green, photographer, extraordinaire!

Data Collection in the Plantation!

A day off for workers in America. However we are busy at work in the Canadian north! We started off with clarification of recording our data collection in Excel. Whorls, laterals, Apical terminals (a new rap song beginning?) leading to the BIG QUESTION…

Why are we doing this?

Here is Twitter version of an answer:

The tree line will shift farther north as the climate changes. We are gathering data on seedlings to note test results if trees can survive on the Arctic tundra.

We loaded up with our rain gear, boots and tools and headed back to the plantation to continue the seedling sampling we started yesterday.

Polygonal Peat Plateaus to the right and ponds to the left…on to pursuing the prolific perfect plantation performances despite precipitation.

This time around you could hear “Good, another dead one!” as the teams ventured down the rows on hands, knees and even one blow up knee pad. A light sprinkle ensued just as we were all ready for a warm lunch and we headed back into Carley’s van for our luncheon date. An hour and 15 minutes later as the rain started coming down even harder we gathered umbrellas and headed out to finish the seedling sampling. In teams of three we measured live and dead height, and counted the number of whorls, length of terminals and laterals, if the tree had any terminal buds to indicate growth for next year and finally noted the quality of the needles and any other relevant comments. We ended this task by gathering some data points on our GPS and double checking a few of other groups initial findings (quality control in the field!).

Dr. Kershaw was spending the time problem solving and fixing a weather station that had been down since May and met us back in the classroom. We spent the rest of the afternoon consolidating our data and pictures, checking to make sure they made sense and labeling was consistent.

An evening lecture and discussion on Permafrost ended a great day! Please view the video below for a "Live in the Field" interview!