**Location: **Seattle, WA
Hello.
I'm Mike Etnier, and I'll be writing most of the postings this summer for the Kuril Biocomplexity Project (KBP). I wear a lot of different hats, but two of them from that list are a zooarchaeologist and one of the senior researchers on the project. My job description as a zooarchaeologist is that I am supposed to know all animals. And what their bones look like. That's a pretty tall order, and I have to confess that I don't always know what I'm looking at, whether it is a whole animal or a tiny bony part of one. But more often than not, I can figure it out with a bit of sleuthing.
In any case, we are currently gearing up for our third and final summer of field work in the Kuril Island Archipelago. The archipelago stretches between Hokkaido, Japan, and the Kamchatka Peninsula of Russia.
Map of the Kuril Islands, with the distribution of our past and future field sites.
The archipelago is part of a volcanic arc with over 50 islands, islets, and rock piles. The thumbnail sketch of the overarching goal of the KBP is to document the geological and cultural history of the archipelago. Specifically, we are examining the interactions between humans, climatic events (e.g., climate change), and geological events (earthquakes, tsunamis). Over the summer, I'll post entries that detail the specifics of how we will actually do that.
Meanwhile, we're getting all the pieces in place so that we can actually do the field work. If an ending that lacks drama is anticlimactic, the preparatory work for this summer feels a bit "anti-crescendoic". We already have almost all of our equipment purchased or leftover from the last two summers - we have a few pens and pencils to buy - and we still need to get our satellite phones figured out for the summer. But other than that, there is very little to do but to throw my field clothes into a dry bag and hop on a plane. Oh, and wait for our Russian visa applications to clear. We are anticipating leaving the Seattle area about 10 July and have a tentative departure date from Korsakov Harbor of 16 July.
Talk to you again soon!
Dr E.