Getting ready.....
About a month before I go aboard the USCGC Healy the Polar Field Services will ship me my gear for the expedition. The items include steel toed boots, different types of coats, neck gaiter, and much more. The funniest looking boots are the Bunny Boots that look like white Mickey Mouse shoes (see the white boots in the picture below). In a future journal I will talk about and show pictures of the gear.
Me wearing a Mustang suite which must be worn anytime I am out on the deck of the Healy.
Shelves containing all types of boots and tarps.
The Polar Field Services provides all different types of equipment needed in the field from cookware to tents. If you need a cookbook.....man.....they have that too!
Row and rows of sleeping bags and shelves of other items not pictured.
Sometimes teams are out in very remote locations where they cannot get phone service. That means no land line or cell phone service. In these cases they use a satellite phone. Yes, just like it sounds..... the signal from the phone is from a satellite orbiting the Earth. Can you believe it, I call my mom and she does not answer the phone? It was amazing that her "please leave a message" was very clear.
Here I am calling my mom on a satellite phone.
Can you sense it?
What do organisms that photosynthesis do at night? That's right, they respire. The opposite of photosynthesis is respiration. What do they release? Carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is released and we release this all the time. Now imagine that it is winter in the Arctic. This is a time they are experiencing several months of darkness. The microbes (very small organisms) in the soil are busy breaking down carbon that is released into the atmosphere. When you see snow covered ground there is still activity going on. Researchers are studying the carbon balance in the tundra. As climate change continues this disrupts some normal processes. To learn more about these microbes and the carbon they release, follow Tom Lane (Carbon Balance in Warming and Drying Tundra 2013) in Healy, Alaska.
Elizabeth Webb with a device that measures how much carbon is released by microbes in the soil.
The computer picked up the release of carbon from Elizabeth when she exhaled into the circular device.
This is a close up of the device as it rests on top of the bare ground