We are learning so much as we prepare for our expeditions! The organizers at ARCUS have brought back several teachers who participated in past expeditions and they have been very helpful. Jeff Peneston, who was abroad the Oden icebreaker in 2008, explained how we can involve our students in live events from the field using the internet and satellite phones. Ute Kaden, who was aboard the USCG icebreaker Healy when it motored right to the North Pole in 2007, talked about what her life was like after her expedition ended. She later went to the South Pole so she joked that she's "bipolar." These guys are both so excited about what they went through and I know they brought that excitement home to their students. I hope I can do the same! Jeff had his art teacher make life-size models of the animals he would see on canvas. They are incredible and really help people understand just how large these creatures are. Below you can see us displaying the painted version of the Wandering Albatross, which can have a wing span of 11 feet! These gentle giants can circumnavigate Antarctica in a single foraging trip to find food for their young. Wow!
This fabric model shows how large the real Wandering Albatross really is - a wing span up to 11 feet! What a beautiful bird.
Today we also got to tour the University of Alaska's Museum of the North. The researcher whose expedition I will join, Dr. Jeff Rasic, is the curator of Archaeology for this museum. It was so neat to see some of the carefully-crafted stone tools which have already been found throughout Alaska. Check out the amazing obsidian tools below which may be more than 13,000 years old! These are one of many incredible displays at the Museum of the North.
Ancient obsidian stone tools on display at the Univeristy of Alaska's Museum of the North. Researchers think these tools may be more than 13,000 years old. They were once really important to somebody!
The museum also displayed skulls of extinct bison and mammoth. Hopefully our research this summer will help us understand if the folks who came across the Bering land bridge were hunting these magnificent animals. I get to hang out with Dr. Rasic tomorrow and I heard he knows how to flint knapp stone tools. I hope he'll show me how. We're going to eat caribou and musk ox for dinner! I'll tell you how it tastes. One thing we won't be eating is the steppe bison which is extinct. Here's a picture of a skull they have on display at the Museum of the North.
This is the skull of a steppe bison - now extinct - on display at the Museum of the North. This summer when we search for fluted projectile points (stone spearheads) we may find more bison remains suggesting people hunted these animals after crossing the Bering land bridge.