Day 3

Weather for today calls for a very nice and sunny -20 C. I must make sure to take my sunscreen.

Today we are getting in to the real stuff, although the whole thing is starting to feel a little like the book Holes. The only thing missing is Warden Walker with poisonous nail polish to keep us in line.

We are digging at two different sites with substantially more snow. The first is a Polygonal Peat Plateau, which is a land formation that forms around wedges of permafrost, and at a Tree Island, which is not really an island but rather a bunch of trees in the open tundra. The Tree Island snow depth should be about 5 feet deep. Getting a 5 foot snow core sample will be tricky since we are working with 5 foot coring tubes. That means digging to the bottom each time to make sure we got the full depth. We do 2 or 3 pits per site and 11 core samples per pit, so that means 22 or 33 times digging down to the bottom. This whole thing makes my worst day at MMT lke a piece of cake.
I inserted a picture of all the "tools of the trade" that we use: thermometers to measure temperature at every five cm of snow, pressure gages to measure density, scales for weight, measuring tape, clipboard, coring tubes,...
The reason for digging at different sites is that the snow drift, accumulation and crystal types differ greatly on location. It really is quite funny (interesting funny, not haha funny, that is) how two day into the work, we are all talking about the differences between III-A-3 snow and Pukak snow as if we have been doing this type of work for years and actually know what we are doing.
For each pit we dig, we collect three snow samples to bring back to the study center. Once we are there we measure for Ph and conductivity. The purpose is all rather complex, but in a nut shell, conductivity increases with salt content and they are trying to figure out if climate change is impacting the salt being blown onto the land before Hudson Bay freezes over. All rather complex, but I guess they know what they are doing. They are scientists after all.

If you want to get a sense of what all this data is used for, take a look at this paper written by the director of this expedition, Pete. It gives you an idea of how climate change is measured and how digging holes in the snow really is a useful endeavor.
No Northern lights yet. We keep going out at night hoping to catch a good view, but so far without any luck. Tomorrow a "northern lights" specialist is arriving here who is willing to wake us up in the middle of the night if they appear. I certainly hope to catch some before I return to balmy New York