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.