last day on the tundra

In literature and film, when authors or directors call attention to weather, they are portraying in sky the pathos of their characters. Ergo, a torrent of emotional introspection finds the character trapped in a car or some such enclosed place whilst a trope of downpour fills windowscapes. Really, pretty much every time it's raining.

It's interesting then that yesterday, our last day on the tundra, as we pulled in the towers for the last time, and said so long to our sites, the weather was shifting among a strange sunniness illuminating the road with huge shadows of clouds all around, small patches of dark showers in the distance, then to clouds, to light rains. It was very unusual weather for this time of year, but not cold or windy or too wet, which made our last day on the tundra pleasant and appropriately strange.

So after a final few experiments, shown below, we packed up and headed in.

Mostly August Photos

Lost Boys, near Barrow, AK

on our days off, we can often be found here playing sea captain and the like. 

i often look put out whenever anyone insists on taking a picture with me, even when the person taking the picture is also me 

Eriophorum vaginatum or cotton grass. Interestingly, the wife of the botanist who named this plant had fuzzy white hair too. 

 premium frolicking grounds

tired polar bear

It's getting quite close to the end of our project now. We moved two towers today, beginning our last of seven total comparison sets. Today was the first fairly clear day without fog or drizzle for nearly two weeks. This is the mistiest place I've ever been. Condensation on the instruments is a recurrent problem in this weather. We have only a few more moves within this set, and next week we will be bringing everything in, calibrating the instruments, and packing up all the stuff to ship to San Diego State, Cove's University. It's starting to get darker at night now, but it's been much too cloudy to see the sun set. I still am glad to be here, but I'm quite ready to come home. I miss my family and friends and the mountains. I heard from my dad today that my grandma in Florida's ill too, and suddenly felt very far away from everyone. Cove's been awesome to work with all summer, patient, good at explaining things, and an all around ethical and hardworking fellow.


As for sensational news, we saw a polar bear Monday.

It was off the road a few miles north of here, along the beach. It had apparently swam over a hundred miles from the sea ice, and was clearly exhausted and barely moving. Occasionally it would lift its head up and then lay it down in a different position, as if trying to get comfortable. It was huge. There were quite a lot of people, probably about thirty, lining the road, some with guns and some taking pictures, and I felt myself participating in an odd group mentality that made the bear seem less dangerous. We were actually very close, about 70 ft or so, on the hill next to the road. At this spot, standing on the road itself, you couldn't actually see the bear or the beach, but had to climb a hill and the bear would suddenly come startling into view. We hung around for about half an hour and then left.

 Later that night, about eleven,  my friend Martijn and I decided to go back. We were driving on the dirt road back toward the point on our ATV, passing several cars and trucks driving back. When we approached the site, only two or three trucks were parked on the side. I slowed down, and stopped when they came into view so I could climb the hill on the side of the road to see down the beach to where the site was. I saw a person walking over the embankment near where the bear had been. A second later I was looking over the hill myself, and saw the huge white body of the bear still in the same place, and two people standing next to it.

Martijn and I approached and saw the bear laying on its back. The belly was cut down the middle and splayed open and scooped out very cleanly already, and the curved frame of ribs could clearly be seen in the sort of banana shaped bowl. The rest of the bear was strangely normal, the head and the body and huge paws, so that if they'd turned the bear over again, it will still look like it was sleeping.

The two people standing next to it were a short white guy with a red beard talking with an Inupiat. After a few moments I said, "Why'd they shoot it?"
"A hunter from the village wanted it," the white guy explained, meaning Barrow.
"Oh." I said.

I didn't take my camera out. We looked for a few minutes, and walked around it. I lifted up a paw, and then touched the fur and it occurred to me it was so clean becuase it had been swimming for so long. A few minutes later two more guys white guys came up over the embankment and towards us. "Why'd they kill it?" One of them asked me. I shrugged.

The end of the world, and a beautiful sandwich

Today for lunch, you will be pleased to hear that I made a beautiful sandwich. Ingredients were hummus, cheese, and guacamole between toasts. I won't post a picture of it because I feel pictures of lunches are already well represented in the blogsphere, and also, I already ate it. Besides it tasted much better than it looked, which was like smashed bugs and cheese.

Now that we are well over halfway done with our project, I suppose I should tell you what it's all about. First of all, we are not directly studying global warming but the tundra ecosystem: what the study is actually measuring, the flux of methane and carbon dioxide gasses in tundra drained lake basins, is independent of a change in climate insofar as it is always happening, and right now we happen to be measuring it. These rates pertain to climate change in important ways, and when scientists want to know about global warming and its effects, studies like Cove's play a vital role.

Whether or not climate change is happening and what its effects might be are good questions. I referred to a website about it that i liked in an earlier post. I also liked this Naom Chomsky clip, in which he answers a question about global warming. Not that Chomsky should be taken as an expert in this area, but I think he phrases the situation well. I edited it down, but the complete clip is here. 

What we are studying specifically is carbon dioxide and methane flux on the tundra. So, we all know that human's breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, and that plants breath in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen. This is simplified of course, but anyway, biomes are quite complicated versions of this. In a given ecosystem, you will have animals and plants decomposing and growing, taking carbon from the air and soil, emitting them, depositing them, and lots and lots of microbes doing the same. The tundra is a particularly interesting case because a huge amount of the arctic is frozen in the form of permafrost or ocean ice. As the globe warms, and the ground thaws, and the ice melts, and a vast amount of organic material becomes available, this biome has the potential to change its whole game very quickly, much more quickly than tropical or temperate system for instance.

The arctic is particularly sensitive to what scientists call feedback loops, in which the effects of warming in turn has its own warming effect which must also be figured into climate changing models. In the case of sea ice for example, ice reflects much more solar energy than it absorbs, whereas open water absorbs much more solar energy than it reflects. So, as the area of water increases relative to the area of ice, the total area now has a much greater capacity for absorbing heat, which will in turn make it melt faster, and so on. This process also introduces a lot of water vapor into the atmosphere above the arctic, which has its own short-term powerful warming greenhouse effect.

Tundra permafrost is a good example of a feedback system as well. Stored in the tundra is a huge amount of carbon (a "sink") in the form of frozen organic material. As it thaws, this massive sink may become an increasingly big player in the global methane and carbon budgets, as much of this suddenly usable organic material is gobbled up by skyrocketing populations of microbes. The worry is the world will suddenly have a lot more carbon and methane in the atmosphere to deal with than was originally expected, which is no small worry since the recently measured amounts of carbon and methane measured in the worldwide atmosphere have exceeded even the most generous predictions, and everyone is wondering where the hell the additional gas is coming from after the known human and natural sources are taken into account. The larger concern is the worry that the globe has already warmed to the point where feedback systems are strong enough to sustain these warming trends. This is the "tipping point" Chomsky mentioned. See: Runaway Climate Change.

Sometimes I think that the popularity of apocalyptic cinema and literature and video games, is in part thanks to an unconscious sense of the unsustainable state of the world, population, resource consumption, etc: our fear of doomsday confronted sitting in a soft butter stained theater seat. When you are leaning back during the production, think about how your head is nuzzling back into the blue cushions in the same way as all the other greasy heads of hair that have come before you. Gross, right? Hair is quite gross in most contexts actually, and I... well, never mind.

So anyway, one of the most important applications of Cove's PHD project is that is offers a good picture of what tundra cycles look like. Over this summer, and previous summers, his group has looked at as many relevant seasonal variables as possible. Carbon dioxide and methane emissions are the main focus, and require the most expensive instruments, but the data given by additional tundra measurements make its explanatory power much more far reaching. For instance, knowing an area's thaw depth, the amount of sunlight it received, the flux of heat in and out of the ground, how much water is in the soil, and the temperature of the soil, gives his data the power to offer projections of what carbon and methane flux might look like these variables change. If he notices that a given area of water saturated tundra compared to drier tundra emits such and such amount of methane, this data would allow him to look at a satellite image of tundra and hypothesize how much methane might be being emitted from a large area. Similarly, let’s say he noticed that for every increase of 10 cm in thaw depth, he saw an increase of 20% in methane CO2 emissions. All this would be very useful data for scientists trying to figure out things about how and when and how much the tundra will be a source of methane and carbon dioxide. 

The instruments we are using to measure these fluxes are also quite cool. Methane and carbon dioxide are measured by separate instruments. They are called open-path infrared gas analyzers: they beam infrared light back and forth to detect how much of a specific gas is in the path at a given time at 10 hertz, or ten times per second. This is coordinated with wind measurements taken by a sonic anemometer, which sends high frequency sound bleeps, or whatever, between its many sensors (six sensors), and measures the wind speed and direction in a three dimensional space. It has two white poles, one above and one below, with three senors each on claw-like looking appendages at the ends pointed at each other. The fluxes, the up and down flow of these gases, are then calculated from all this data with a method called eddy covariance, which remains a member of the set of all things I don't really understand very well at all. So yeah. Neat.

oh, hello

Middle-July-ish photos

are here-ish.

I saw a beluga whale, but not really in a good way

We were on our way to the library today when Tony, our own Inupiat logistic contact, came on the radio telling anyone listening that beluga whales had been spotted. I radioed him back asking where, and he answered, somewhat unhelpfully, that boats were chasing them around. We continued driving, and soon spotted some boats out on the ocean, and several people nearby on the road. We parked and jumped out just in time to see a guy on the shore lifting a gun and shooting into the shallows. The bullets made a huge splash, but I couldn't see anything in the water. A boat or two zipped around in the distance. We hung around for a bit, and heard another gunshot way off, but nothing much else happened, and it was cold, so we continued on to the library, and dropped off our checked out items. The road follows the shoreline, and on our way back we saw a boat driving slowly parallel to the shore. It sat heavy in the water, and at an angle, as if it was pulling something obscured by the wake. Pretty soon, we were standing with a group of onlookers, watching these native guys trying to haul this eerily white skinned animal up onto the sand with big trucks that kept getting stuck in the sand. At some point I noted similarities between modern rednecks and the culmination of thousands of years of Inupiat traditions.

And then I hopped around with my camera taking video and pictures, and even posted them on the internet. They are somewhat graphic, so please don't look at them.

Here's the photo album:  BelugaOffersItselfToInupiats

Added: If it's not already apparent, I would guess these are the worst and therefore also most visible examples of Inupiat traditional hunting rights.

pulling things on the tundra

bits of whale on top of large cages from an old wooden tower

bits of whale on a platform thing near our hut

huge fan things in a room at the back of an old abandon warehouse/shop place

the building where our lab is, and the road to it

arctic ocean ice

graves by a lake in a tundra field off the road

artifact tanks of some sort near our hut

I didn't mean to be irresponsible. Really, it just happens naturally.

Last night I drunk too much, I mean I drank too much, I mean I woke up this morning to find that last night I had drank, far too much.

As these things go, I still don't feel too well. It's about three in the afternoon, and my day has alternated with an almost clinical regularity between hopeful optimism and nausea. You wake up sick, the head ache, the scrunched up eyes, the burning down your throat that seems to waft up from your belly, and strangely enough, the first emotion is a sort of self-annoyance. "Really Ryan's body? Seriously? You're going to feel this crap for drinking a mere... a mere... hold on... how much did I actually drink last night?"

It isn't long before the first infection of optimism sets in. You think, "Get up, move about, drink some water, you'll be fine in no time old chap!" ... but holy crap no. It's as if all the awfulness you have created has settled softly like silt at the bottom of a muddy puddle, and those initial movements, the sitting up and swinging your legs over the side of the bed, stirs it all up inside you and swirls in around up and down your body, and then it begins to kind of pulsate, and you think, "god oh god, lay back down again this instant you fool!" But it's too late. You lay back down, and it doesn't subside at all, and then it is just you, alone with this hot swirling mass of nausea, and all your pathetic efforts at laying as still as possible are to no avail. The beast is awakened; your stillness now only makes you painfully aware of its every movement, its chortles, and its heavy breath.

The next major landmark is vomit, which doesn't happen right away. Vomit is a tease. In the beginning there is only the hint at the idea of the possibility of puking. You dismiss it quickly, and good thing too as it has this strange and utterly stupid tendency to grow at an alarming rate if dwelt upon at all. So you don't think about it, opting instead for a slow trudge toward the exactly same, totally inevitable outcome. The stream of consciousness version runs like this:

"Lie still, and think about something else. Yes. Just lie still ... wait, am i going to be sick?... think about something else. Lie still and ... I think this just might actually happen ... Okay, no, you're okay, now just lie still and think about something else. Think about something else... I should have a container, just in case... okay... lie still!... if you move, you'll be sick for sure... just think about something else, something else, something else... okay, okay.. oh shit... find something quick you fool!"

The next douse of optimism begins before anything is ejected at all. It happens almost right after you've accepted your fate, and realize that, no matter what you do, you very soon will be another member of the sorry class of persons in the world vomiting at this instant. So you're about to hurl, and your optimism takes the following form: "Okay. No. It's okay. Enough of this beating around the proverbial bush. I'll feel better after a thorough session of vomiting."

And you vomit. And wait. And vomit some more. And wait. And then vomit again. And when you're sure you're done, you wipe your chin, drink a small quantity of something to get the taste of stomach out of your mouth, and lay back down. And you actually do feel a little better for a time.

At this point, you will undoubtedly begin to begin intellectualizing. You decide to approach the problem with facts. You will think your way out of being sick. You reason thusly: hangovers are a symptom of dehydration. My body is as it is because it has been denied one of its most vital resources. Therefore, small quantities of water imbibed at regular intervals will be eagerly welcomed by my body, and before I know it, I'll be on the steady road to recovery. Indeed, each moment will be better than the last!

You sip some water. That feels nice, doesn't it? you sip a little more. Your doing fine. You sip more still, and then you head back to your bed, to lay down, and wait for this magical water to do its magic. Nicely done. It isn't too long before you discover your body wasn't at all convinced by your impeccable logicality. Or, more likely, it isn't at all ready to trust you again so quickly when it comes to consuming liquids. We all know what happens; soon we are once again vomiting.

This general pattern continues for some time. It is in fact a slow and miserable, but nevertheless upward, spiral to feeling better again. So now, yes, I feel somewhat better. I also feel embarrassed, foolish, and ... optimistic. I promise I never again will drink too much, and that from now on I will be a generally fitter, happier, and more productive person. Hurrah for me.

Midnight Sun

taken a little after midnight

gluing feathers on each other

Here are some tundra creepies I collected yesterday. A spider, and a little gnat sort of creature. Normally boring, but flora and fauna take on all sorts of interesting when you realize their species have somehow managed to eek out a living in the arctic. Like how an ordinary person suddenly becomes a fascinating individual when you learn he was at DDay, or a journalist in Gaza.
"What? You liberated Europe from the Nazis? Well, isn't this a treat!"
"Serious? You survive most the year in freezing temperatures, regularly dropping to 30 below?! Put 'er there buddy!" Like that. Exactly like.... that.

Anyway, bugs have absolutely nothing to do with what we're doing here, but hauling sleds of equipment back and forth from ATVs has given me a lot of time to study the tundra as well as my boots. A bit about the tundra: Tundra comes from a Lappish word (Lappish?), that means "elevated wasteland." And while it is a wasteland in its conspicuous lack of  trees or bushes (other than this woody shrub that creeps along the ground), and probably looks a lot more wastelandish (more wasted?) in early spring and late autumn, I have not experienced anything I would call barren at all.

The tundra here is a thick spongy organic layer of mosses, lichens, grasses, and small shrubs. It squishes down under your feet, and springs back up behind you, and if you bend down and pull it apart, it separateness and slices it like an enormous layer of cake. In other places it is muddy and wet, and often it looks like fields of short prairie land grass, with relief caused by frost action creating frost boils and ice-wedge polygons.  Below this spongy stuff is the active layer, a layer of organic material and soil that freezes and thaws yearly, and beneath this is the permafrost, ground that is frozen year-round. One of the measurements we take at all our sites is the thaw depth with a thaw depth rod (a metal pole with a pointy end. ) It's easy to do, because the rod slides down through the soft organic layer (heh heh), and then hits this rock hard soil, ice solid, so that you would have to chip at it to go any further.

Nothing drains from here. I think I mentioned this last post, but the flat landscape with the underlayer of permafrost means that lakes and lake basins are everywhere. See the little lakes in the picture? What we are studying are these lake basins, mainly comparing carbon flux among basins of different ages. More detail in a later post, but here is the abstract for a similar study, done a few years ago by Cove's adviser and another grad student.

Any study measuring elements of an ecosystem is important, i think, but the reason these studies have received a lot of attention is the current trends in the Arctic Circle of rising temperatures and loss of sea ice.

As the globe warms, the arctic will warm more than the rest of the planet. Here is a good explanation of why this is the case. The permafrost contains a huge reservoir of carbon as as organic matter. These sinks, as they are called, of carbon in the arctic have often not been taken into account in models seeking to predict future climate change. As the arctic warms and the permafrost thaws,these massive stores of carbon may be released into the atmosphere in relatively short amounts of time. The possibility of the sudden addition of new factor into our global ecosystem should be taken seriously; carbon is especially significant as it will increase the amount of solar radiation that is trapped and absorbed as heat in our atmousphere, rather than passing back into space.

Another gas we are measuring is methane, which, as a greenhouse gas is calculated to have ~25 times greater warming effect per unit than carbon dioxide, although there is quite a bit less methane in the atmosphere. Methane has recently been quite a hot topic in the field, much because of a researcher in Siberia who lit a match and ignited a methane bubble released from the ice (as well as doing a lot of research about it too.) Read about her here, if interested.

Of all the possible consequences of a warming planet, I think people living in coastal regions in third world areas in Asia have the most to worry about soonest. The effects of a rising sea level and the accompanying intense storms due to global warming will be most inconvenient for them, as cities, towns, and shanty towns flood and are ravaged by tsunamis.

I still haven't really talked about what I've been doing here, or what life is like in Barrow... so anyway, here's me doing something somewhat dangerous:

arctic ocean

i call it "some grass in some water"

a shoe

i call it, "the wtf? collection"

at the beach

moralistic dumpster messages are common throughout Barrow

Ryan's Northern Sojourn and the Experiences Confronted Within, Thereof, and Inasmuch

welcome to my first blog post from Barrow, Alaska. It reads, I fear, like a grade school report in some places, with lots of little factoids, superficial analyses, and infused with authorial self-importance. I have therefore dubbed it, Ryan's Northern Sojourn and the Experiences Confronted Within, Thereof, and Inasmuch. I write now having just finished my dish of canned vegetables and tuna fish in a mayonnaise sauce.

Barrow is unique, not only because it is the northern most city in Alaska, nor for the 24 hours of daylight in summer. These are functions of location, just as any city similarly positioned on the Arctic Ocean will also find mounds of ice piling up on the shores.  It really does just pile up too, 20 ft high in some places.

I climbed up on one of these mounds the other day and looked across the ocean icescape. It like geology in fast motion: mountains and valleys forming, as ice melts and cracks and refreezes, water running down forming lakes and canyons and networks of rivers. Anyway, I'll post a picture if I find a good one.

More unique to Barrow proper is its blend of the old world indigenous culture of the Inupiat people, its modern assimilation since, and its blending with whitie, all in an interesting context of the arctic. Compared with the traditional Native American story, in terms of having their lands stolen from under them and their people exploited, before being nudged off in some unwanted tract of desert, etc, they have fared better than most. Firstly, for a long time, they have been well protected by ice and mountains and what is to most opportunists a generally unagreeable climate and useless land. When modernity found ways to exploit them, fortunately it was late enough in the game that they were granted some sovereignty, civil rights and protection. This is all just my impression of course --- I don't really know much of the history.  The first real threat was from whalers, who almost entirely depleted the whale population in the late 1800s, and the Inupiat were hard hit, so I read. Whaling became illegal however in time, and the whale population has since recovered, and I think the Inupiats are the only people who still hunt them. I also heard each tribe member gets 20 grand a year or something like that for allowing oil-companies to drill on their land. 

Anyway, the Inupiats, and everyone else here for that matter, all live in little houses on stilts that go deep into the frozen ground, which, i guess, tends to shift a lot as the permafrost freezes and thaws, making foundations impossible. For the same reason, they have only dirt roads. Nothing will drain into the frozen ground, and so pools tend to form everywhere. There is no vegetation in the city, and so what it all amounts to in the summer is rows of houses all very close together, sticking up out of the mud and pools of water, on either side of a constantly maintained, high dirt road. As you can imagine might happen in place with an entire season of total darkness [added: only actually a month of total darkness] and lows of -30 F, everything is very close together and the junk accumulated in yards in ubiquitous.

Another unique thing about the two overlapping worlds here, is that many of visitors are in some way connected to the scientific community. Where we are living isn’t technically Barrow, which is a mile or two down the road. It’s called Narl, and much of it is what looks like mini airplane hangers, "quansa huts” I guess. A military base was originally here, from the days of the Cold War, I think, perhaps from when the Russian were planning to cross Siberia and invade Seattle via Canada. Now much of it has been rented out to scientists, and also for storage, and a large part of it is an Inupiat technical college.

A little on the Inupiat people too, as they are called. Eskimo, I guess, is slightly pejorative and somewhat vague too, although I don't think anyone would take serious offense at the title. It means "eaters of raw meat," by the way. Inuit, i think is technically correct too, not false, but still misleading in some respects. Ah. The whole thing is confusing. But what they refer to themselves as, (and what the wiki article describes too), is Inupiat. They have whale hunting rights, and caribou hunting rights, and I think they even get to club baby seals if they want, a privilege none of us will never enjoy. They also can do pretty much whatever the hell they like on the tundra. We on the other hand have to carry little permits, and haul all our equipment on sleds (over tundra, not snow) from our ATVs parked on the road.

The only way to get a slab of whale meat legally, I think, is to buy it off an Eskimo, an opportunity which has not yet presented itself. As for what I have been doing since I've been here, I know, I’ve said almost nothing. I've been here two weeks, and we have done a lot of stuff. Why haven't I been emailing anyone or blogging? Funny story. Truth is, one of the first nights I was here, I was trying to stream The Daily Show, but the internet connection was too slow, so instead I tried downloading it via a torrent, which was really a virus that proceeded to do all sorts of unspeakable and unholy things to my laptop. So, there you go. I hear I've missed all sorts of great news and jokes about Mr. Weiner and his massively misplaced member. Cove, the grad student I'm working with, actually let me borrow his laptop today, as he was out, and I am in, and that is how I've managed to type up, (from a note book [added]). and post this whole thing.  So thanks Cove. I'm having someone look at my laptop too, so hopefully it will be workable soon too. Until then.