Day 9: Last time into the wilderness

10:15 AM: I am very happy to announce that I did survive my night in the igloo. Not only that. I actually overslept (they had to wake us at 7:30) and missed breakfast and a skype session with the finance club. The temperature inside the igloo was -22 (but it was a dry -22.) Once you zip up into the sleeping bag with little more than a few square inches of face showing you get very comfortable very quickly. The ground gets covered with caribou skins to insulate. It is pitch black and completely quiet inside. I would recommend it greatly.

Last night was another spectacular Northern Lights show. Add to that a comet that is currently passing over and you have yourself the world's best IMAX theater.

As noted above, today is our last venture into the field to collect Spruce samples. The temperature is currently about -52, which is just about the lowest point you can still go out and function relatively well. I will return this afternoon to update you.

Here is a picture of all the members of this expedition and our CNSC staff. Given the wind some opted to show as little face as possible.

I made it back from the field all in good spirits so let me try to answer some of the questions that have been posted to the best of my ability.
How often are you able to see these northern lights (if you are up late enough to be able to see them)? And how often are they supposed to be visible up there? They appear mostly from September through March. The peek time is about 11:30 PM to 2AM. They don't appear every night and the intensity and color changes tremendously. Obviously it has to be a clear night. We have been lucky and have had about 6 nights of some lights, 2 of which were very good. The aurora guy, Roger, up here gave them a 5 out of 10, but he has been chasing them his whole life. Below is a map of the current activity updated every three minutes. You can use that to predict the activity for the night. Go to www.spaceweather.com to check out the latest info.

So, since there are so many different types of snow, as New Yorkers, do we receive the different types, or does only the Artic have a variety? I don't think any given place has all 72 types, but NY does have a variety. The type of snow greatly depends on temperature, moisture, depth of pack and a few other . The bottom layers change as a result of the pressure and the temperature change. When you dig more than about 30 cm the temperature really starts to go up as you get closer to the ground. That is because the snow is a great insulator and keeps te thermal heat from escaping.
What is the average depth of the snow that you are working in, meaning how far down is it until you reach the soil? There really is no average depth. The one thing that determines the depth more than anything here is exposure to wind. On the open tundra is can be as little as 3 cm of icy snow and in the forest it reaches 3 meters of light and fluffy snow.
When you were observing the northern lights did you feel a temperature change when they first appeared in the sky and after they disappeared? I can't say I did. Remember though that it was minus 50 C last night and even a five degree increase or decrease would not be obvious. I will ask the resident aurora specialist if it does happen and get back to you.
Were the northern lights only yellow or were there other colors hidden in them that can not be seen in the pictures? What you see are mostly white, with slight tint of green and an occasional red. The camera shows color better than we can observe. There are some blue lights as well, but I have not seen any.

Day 8, windchill minus 50 tonight

Yesterday and today have been rough days. The temperature has dropped significantly (another 10 degrees) because of brutal winds. Getting dressed today was an even longer process than usual. I added another layer just to be ont he safe side. The problem was that we had to hike quite a bit to get into the forest which causes you to sweat which then freezes. Yesterday we went out for the day to the Twin Lakes site to collect still more snow samples and branches. I learned that frozen sandwiches really aren't that bad. It just takes a little longer to eat them. The branches, really only two inches of the end of the branches, are being collected for Dr. Kershaw's grad student, Steve, who is writing his Ph.D. on wind abrasion on spruce needles and the impact of climate change on the arctic tree line (can't make this stuff up). For each tree we need nine little cuttings (Three from the eastern side, three from the north-western side and three from the southern side, taken from different heights) to measure the impact of wind and sun. As you can tell from the tree picture, they are rather oddly shaped, with most of the branches growing from one side because of the wind.

Going out in the snow mobile box (locally know as the qamatuk) is getting pretty tough and some of our Earthwatch people are starting to show signs of exhaustion. One member of the group suffered some frostbite on the tip of her nose. It is not sure if we will be able to go out at all tomorrow because of the weather. It also appears that Calm Air, which is supposed to take us out of here on Wednesday, might not be flying tomorrow and if they are, the road that takes us to the airport might be closed to snowdrifts. This could get exciting.
I am booked for the igloo for tonight, but do I really need to do this? I certainly am having my doubts about the wisdom of doing this.
I have included a picture of a ptarmigan, apparently a grouse family bird, for Mr. Moore. I am sticking to my story that they have a chicken-like walk and size. Like most of the animals around here they are hard to spot and tend to stay away from people. We saw them only once for a few minutes. You also have to remember that you have to bury your camera pretty deep in your layers of clothing to make sure that it doesn't freeze, so taking a picture takes quite a bit of time. By the time you take off your mittens, dig out the camera and get ready to take the photo it is too late. We did not manage to photograph the arctic fox.

Day 7, 3AM: A Northern Lights spectacle

I know it is three AM and I will have to get up in about 3 and a half hours but I just wanted to share the experience we just had. For the last 4 hours we have been sitting in the observation dome watching the most incredible display of Northern lights I ever imagined. At times it filled the whole sky after which it would move rapidly and pull apart into streaks and clusters off lights, all the while becoming brighter and dimmer. You could really observe what looked like massive explosions of light, which would “rain down” in a curtain like fashion. At other times is would snake across the sky, constantly changing shapes Without a doubt this makes it to my top five of most amazing sights ever. One fellow who came all the way from England to observe the lights took all the extraordinary pictures you see here. You can get a sense of the magnitude of this spectacular event. Just multiply it by 4 hours across the whole sky and you can see why I am bright awake right now. The little dots you see are a combination of stars and reflections of snow flakes. We also learned what causes the Northern lights. I could try to tell you in my own words but it is much wiser to quickly check out this little description here. I have many more pictures but don't want to break the network here by uploading them all in massive files.

Day 6 (I think. I am losing track of time)

Hi again,
Today was brutal. The wind has really picked up and the temperature has dropped significantly. Funny thing is (funny haha this time) that our expedition leader decided to postpone our day trip to tomorrow because is was supposed to be much warmer (only -17), only to find out tonight that they revised the forecast and that tomorrow is going to be worse. Because of the time constraint we have no choice though and have to go out for the day tomorrow.

Last night we saw some spectacular Northern lights. We got woken up about 11:30 PM and went out. As we were out there, it looked as if a giant snake (mostly white with some green) was crawling across the sky, constantly changing shape. I didn't manage to take pictures because you need a set-up that allows you to set very long exposure and I wasn't set up for that with my sleepy head. The picture here was taken by Erica S., a fellow Earthwatch teacher (so are the other pictures below). You get the idea a bit in the photo, but it is really an amazing sight.

Several people have asked me how one gets out of an 8 foot hole. The answer is that you have to build steps that lead out. There simply is no other way to even consider getting out. Luckily the snow is quite hard and can easily carry your weight. Although after reading the reference to "The Shining" in one of the comments, I must say that I did not sleep very well last night.

Finally finished the igloo and tonight the first three "volunteers" are sleeping out. I'll let know how that went and then make my decision about my plans. Given that I helped build it, I have my doubt about its viability. Some of the pieces are defying gravity and look like they are about to fall.

I want to share the picture on the left with you. Perhaps the coolest snow flake I have ever seen (at least top five). It is quite difficult to get a good photo that is in focus. The lines on the black background are about 3mm apart, so it was about 1.2 cm long. I guess you can tell I have been out in the snow too long.

I'll let you know tomorrow how it feels to be out in -40 for 8 hours.

Day 5

A day off at last and a good one it was. The wind turned so that it is now coming from the North, which means a significant drop in temperature because of windshield factor. Tomorrow looks even worse. Wind at 40 to 60 km per hour resulting in minus 40 C temperatures. Any exposed skin will really freeze in short time. We got a preview of that today when we were out building an igloo. Suddenly one of the guys had a serious case on his nose which had turned the color of white porcelain. Luckily we were right outside the building and he was able to go inside and warm up.
Back to our igloo for a minute. Calling it an igloo might be generous. It looks like a cross between the leaning tower of Pisa and Gehry's Bilbao building.
It's definitely "amateur hour at the arctic" and we just got booed of the stage.
The absolutely funniest thing (ok maybe things are funnier up here) was that in the middle of our "construction" some tourists came by and took pictures as if we were local and actually knew what we were doing. The idea is that some time in the next 4 nights we all get a turn to sleep out in the igloo. Apparently nobody has made it through the night in the last 10 years. I'm not sure if I am ready to end that streak. I promise a picture of the finished product tomorrow.

So, today we went to town for an outing. Visited the Eskimo museum and an exhibit at the train station about the history of Churchill. Some of my group members decided to go for the dog sledding experience. I must say that the best part was watching the dogs. They are beautiful animals. The actual ride was a 10 minutes lap through the musher's back yard. All of it had a bit of a Disney ride feeling.

Tomorrow we are going out to a more remote site (45 minutes in the box sled) which means we will be taking lunch with us. Yum, frozen sandwiches! Can't take water because it will become a solid block of ice. Promises to be quite an adventure.

Day 4

Hi there, The Marymount bunny has made it to the arctic's edge. It is a rare sighting, but I was lucky and managed to get a picture.

Today, we went for our deepest pit yet: 248 cm.
That is about 8 feet deep. Just to give you an idea of what this means. Yao Ming is 7 foot 6 (in high heels he might approach 8 feet) and the average NY apartment has 8 foot ceilings. Makes digging out the car in NYC feel like child's play. It is, however, surprising how much you manage to sweat in -16 degrees C when you are digging a very deep hole in the snow. The hardest part is throwing the snow out each time without it falling on your head. As you can tell from the picture below, I wasn't always successful and ended up with a head full of snow on a few occasions. Once we finished we set out to do the scientific part. Measuring the temperature every 5 cm meant we had to get 50 different readings. Interestingly, the temperature goes up the deeper down you get, reaching about zero C at ground level.
Surprisingly there were only two layers of snow: pukak and III-A-3 (I'm sure you are as excited about that as I am). The whole job took the three of us about 5 hours of intense work.

Life in Churchill has a very slow pace. You eat,
you dig holes and do all the scientific things, you eat, you dig, you eat, you sit through a lecture, and you go to sleep. And so it goes.

Finally caught some Northern Lights last night. I didn't manage to get a good photo because they were rather faint, but it looked light a rainbow of light across the sky. Sometimes they have colors, but we weren't that lucky.

Friday is our day off from digging and we will be taking a trip to town . There is the option to do some dog sledding, but it is rather pricey (80 Can$, or about 65 US$ for 20 minutes). I'll have to see what the "realness" factor is before deciding on that one. For most people in Churchill, tourism is the main source of employment and right now there are virtually none here because the polar bears are way out on the bay. Dog sledding is the only attraction in town now and they do have a bit of a monopoly. Not like we go to the next town for better prices.

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

Day 2: some pictures

Today has been our first full day in the field. We set out about 9AM in about -33 degrees C (wind shield -42C) with out tools to measure everything you ever wanted to know about snow. Obviously, the secret is in the layering and making sure that no skin is exposed during transit on the snow mobile. We surveyed two different sites, a polygonal peat plateau and a tundra site. Both had relatively shallow snow cover (up to 40 cm, Canadians do everything metric so I am counting on you to convert temperatures and distances.) but we were fully exposed to wind and sun, which can be quite strong. The process is not that complicated but it takes time and a great deal of attention to detail. It really is a skill to tell various layers of snow apart. I added a picture below with all the snow categories for the unbelievers out there.
We also trekked onto Hudson Bay, which is obviously frozen solid, to see a ship wreck. On the way we encountered many tracks of wolves and foxes. One wolf was spotted (see photo), which is a rare occasion.
At night we had a lecture on climate change and it was interesting to see how the data we have collected is being used in the studies. I will forward a copy of the lecture to Mr. Walters (too big to put on the blog)
One thing that has become very clear is that people up here spend a very large amount of time eating. Breakfast (at 6:45), lunch (12) and dinner (5:30) all consist of enormous amounts of high calorie food. I guess beach season up here is pretty short.

Day 1.

Got to meet all my expedition mates today. There are two other teachers through the Earthwatch program, 6 Shell employees who came from all over the world, including Australia and Malaysia, and a few eco-science tourists.
After a long lecture this morning on the enormous science of snow (did you know there are 72 different kinds of snow?) and the importance of the work we are doing here, we finally got to do field work (that is scientist lingo for grunt work I think.) Field work consists of a bone-rattling trip in a wooden box being dragged behind a snow mobile to get to the right location in "the field". Once we get there, we dig pits about a meter square until we hit dirt. In some places that means one to two feet of snow, in others it goes up to 9 feet deep. Once the pit is dug, we count the number of different layers of snow, figure out what type they are, measure the density, resistance and temperature, and write it all down on worksheets. The point is that all this information is entered in a database to compare it to data that has been collected for the last 3 decades. All in all a very noble undertaking. The tricky part is to do all this in minus 20 degrees Celsius and wrapped up in 5 layers of clothing, three pairs of gloves, and a pair of boots that looks like it would fit Lebron James comfortably. It makes moving around and handling a shovel rather tricky. To get a sense of this I suggest you put on three massive pairs of gloves on top of each other and try to write something with a pencil. The difficult part is to not get too cold or too hot and wet from sweating because that would then freeze and quickly make it rather miserable out there.
I must say that it really is much more fun and exciting than it might sound.

Getting there

Somewhere over Canada between Chicago and Winnipeg.
The flight to Churchill is taking me through Chicago and Winnipeg. About half an hour after leaving Chicago, the landscape below has turned completely white, covered with snow. The plane’s captain just announced that the temperature in Winnepeg is -17 degrees. Good thing I put my heavy coat in my checked luggage.

As part of the Earthwatch expedition, we are partnered up with a school in order to video conference about our experience. My Earthwatch partner , Garry Oughtred, teaches science in Australia. He spent a month at the CNSC ( Churchill Northern Studies Center ) last October. In our video skype conversation yesterday he mentioned off-handedly that during his visit there was a terrible case of gastroenteritis and most visitors had spent several days in bed. It was so bad they called in the Canadian Department of Health. (Is there such a thing as Henry Hudson’s revenge? Reef research in the Bahamas is suddenly looking much more attractive.)

Winnipeg Airport:
Canadian immigration was a little skeptical about my reason for visiting. They decided to empty my luggage completely (every other passenger was waved through with a jolly “welcome to Winnipeg.”). It was only after it became clear that I really only had lots of winter clothes and some papers on climate change that they seemed willing to clear me for entry. They kept asking me just why I wanted to do this. When he pulled out my reading material Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and In Cold Blood the agent gave me a long cold stare over the top of his reading glasses. I think that was Canadian for "What the heck is wrong with you?" I was going to refer them to my blog, but decided not to and mumbled something about polar bears and northern lights instead. Luckily it worked, or I would be on my way back to NY.

Somewhere over Canada between Winnipeg and Churchill.
The plane keeps getting smaller and noisier as I am getting further north. The plane has about 8 rows of 3 seats each, with one full row across the back (like in a bus). Every now and then the captain would say something incomprehensible that sound like a NY subway announcement. All I got was "blah, blah blah.....Churchill......blah, blah..... landing....." I figured it was good news because nobody else seemed to react. The landscape is absolutely beautiful. For as far as the eye can see it looks like tundra and evergreen forest dotted with thousands of lakes and rivers, all covered by snow and ice.

Upon Arrival in Churchill
Collected my bags, which had luckily made in on the same plane and drove into town to pick up real winter gear at the Polar Inn. In a scene that could have been taken from Twin Peaks, the local hotel/gear rental place owner managed to confuse herself and charged five of us each a different price for the same exact gear, each time making extensive use of a calculator.
On the way to the CNSC, saw a severed caribou leg and a live polar fox by the side of the road. I realized I was not in Kansas anymore.

February 10, 5 days to departure

Having gathered all the proper gear (although some of it seems to date back to Napoleon's invasion of Russia), I'm finally ready to head north. No, there are no penguins there. For some reason most people seem to get the wildlife on the North and South poles confused. The question of course is, where in the world am I going. Well, my ultimate destination is 58º 44' 12.68" N 93º 47' 42.94W, also know as the Northern Research Center in Churchill, Manitoba, Canada. I will leave it up to you to enter the coordinates into Google Earth. Churchill is located on the western shore of Hudson Bay, which was named after the very same Henry Hudson who gave us our New York Hudson River. Hudson, sailing for the British, explored the bay in 1610 on his ship the Discovery. On this voyage, his fourth to the New World, his ship became trapped in the ice over the winter, and the crew barely survived by going onshore. When the ice melted in the spring, Hudson wanted to explore the rest of the area, but the crew rebelled and sent Hudson adrift in a small boat along with his teenage son and 8 crew members, never to be seen or heard from again. Luckily, air travel has made the voyage from the Hudson River to the Hudson Bay much quicker and less risky.

10 days to expedition:

Although I have traveled extensively, preparing for this trip to the Artic's edge has been unlike anything I have ever done. Even though New York has had its fair share of freezing temperatures this winter, I'm having a hard time trying to imagine -30 degrees F. Undoubtedly it will be incredibly cold, but just how many layers can one wear and still move around? Apparently the answer is 6, or at least so my guide book tells me. Gathering all the gear has been a challenge. Particularly because I don't really want to spend $700 on a North Face Arctic suit which would be of little use to me when I return to NYC. Army Navy surplus websites have proven to be a good source for some drab but inexpensive and very warm gear.
In preparation for this expedition I have taken a course at the American Museum of Natural History on Climate Change. While it has been fascinating to learn about many of the different issues related to climate change, it has also been a most frightening experience. The predictions for the next century are not a pretty picture and it does not appear there is a whole lot that we as individuals can do about it. Reading the 600 page Stern Report (the internet is amazing) is enough to scare anybody. If pressed for time, take a look at the executive summary. You'll get the picture.