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