Polar Date: July 18, 2008
The fog stuck around and it was even colder last night than it was the night before. I slept in 4 layers and was wearing gloves and a hat. I hope it doesn’t get any colder, if it does I will have so many clothes on I won’t be able to fit into my sleeping bag.
Frown
Today Laura wanted to go to the second oldest plots to get data and those plots are located north of Pump Station 3 on the Haul Road (Dalton Hwy). Carol, Laura, Donna, Mary and I packed lunches, grabbed rubber boots and every warm piece of clothing we owned and took off out of camp,
Our destination looked less like a science research area and more like a gravel pit. And it turned out that it was a gravel pit.
Dalton Highway is both gravel and paved. The highway department has very large gravel pit operations up and down the highway to replenish gravel on the road.
Not to worry, though, a quick walk up and over the gravel hills, down into a little valley where we were yelling to warn any bears of our imposition should they be around, then back up a hill (of course). When we reached the top of a low ridge, we saw the Sag River on the right and a long stretch of tundra on the left with the base of mountains in front of us. It was there we saw the plots.
The fog was ethereal and constant, blocking the top of the ridges from view for the entire day.
We immediately checked the plot map and began our work.
The weather is apparent by the clothing worn by Laura and Mary as they work on one of the dry heath fertilized plots.
The grids got to me, finally and I picked one up and told Mary that we should use the grid for one of the math investigations we teach (we both teach Connected Math). I took her picture holding the grid and she took mine. See if you can figure out how tall I am by using the 1 meter square grid.
Using the 1 meter square grid, can you tell how tall I am? Does it help if I tell you the grid is separated into 25 equal parts?
The day went smoothly, we came back around 4:30. Mary went to help John, Karl and Tom (I still need to tell you about Tom the other teacher from Colorado). They were still processing soil cores.
The soil that was removed from the tundra 2 days ago has undergone dramatic changes in appearance. It has been separated, sieved, weighed, re-separated, re weighed and placed in Ziplock bags, tiny metal pans and paper bags, and there's still more to come!
I hung out there until dinner-time - grilled flank steak, baked potato, salad, steamed vegetables with apple cake for dessert. Then it was back to Lab 2 to work on PolarTrec and get caught up on email until about 9:30.
I will leave you with a riddle in the form of a picture (the caption gives the answer away so don’t read the caption until you figure out the riddle.
After collecting data on percent cover, the next activty was to find 10 leaves of the common species seen in the plots and collect them. The leaves are brought back to the lab where they are scanned and saved in a computer program. Ultimately the data will be used to make 3D models of the leaves.
Signing off from Toolik Lake, and remember, "There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew”. ~Marshall McLuhan, 1964