There were lots of votes for my polar bear friend's name. There were many names had only one vote. I didn't include them on my graph because it would have made it too hard to read. The words would have been tiny. Click on this to see the graph: Bear%20Names.doc

The winning name was Foo Foo. I liked Karen's suggestion to make it "Dr. _____." I decided to call him Doctor Foo Foo. Wow. That's his name. Thank you all for writing in your creative ideas and voting!

Today we dug holes and measured the depth of the organic (living material) and mineral (rocks, pebbles, gravel, sand, silt, clay) layers we found. We also measured the thaw depth. That is the depth of the layers that are not frozen. We were hoping to hit a layer of permafrost (frozen ground) but we didn't get that far down because we kept hitting rock. We saw no frozen ground at all today but we know that it is under there! I was also hoping to find some living things in the soil. I wanted to compare them with what I found in Connecticut. I was lucky enough to find some black ants. We had our wet weather gear on today. The weather held out until after lunch. Then it poured on us. Our paper was waterproof. It was a bit cold, but we kept going. At the end of the day we were coring (boring) trees. We won't be counting the ages of the trees yet. We might look at all of our data toward the end of our stay here.

Ms. J is measuring thaw depth in centimeters. She is measuring the thaw depth in the forest. Then we measured the thaw depth in the forest-tundra and finally in the tundra. Challenge: The tundra area averaged about 12 centimeters. How many inches is that?

Here is a picture of a white spruce tree and the very colorful forest floor. The red leaves are bearberry and blueberry shrubs. The white is different kinds of lichen.

Here is a nice cranberry snack that we found while we were working in the forest. We all tried a few.

IMPORTANT: These Churchill scientists have known for years that these berries were safe. There are many berries in Connecticut and throughout the United States and the world that are not safe. Do not eat any berries that you find outside without asking an adult that you trust.
Challenge: I found out today that the Earthwatch volunteers, like me, are the only people that record the data for scientists here. If people didn't volunteer to come here, they wouldn't have any data at all. How do you think this affects the scientific research here?

Remember, these questions can be answered by students or adults. I look forward to hearing your comments.

Miss Santoro