Allen O'Bannon has years of experience working for the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), five years as a safety instructor and mountaineer in Antarctica and a summer with Polar Field Services in Greenland. He has a wealth of backcountry experience, and has also served as a River Guideand a Guide in Denali. He seems like the right guy to teach a course in Arctic Field Training!
Allen O'Bannon, of Polar Field Services, demonstrating how to use a signal mirror when lost in the wilderness.
Starting a fire without matches.
Allen covered a wide range of topics from basic Wilderness First Aid to helicopter safety. Some salient points included:
- Lightning: You are often the tallest object in the treeless tundra.
- Helicopters: Helicopter crashes result in fire about 20% of the time, the synthetic clothing you wear for the field is made of petroleum and will therefore melt to you in the event of fire.
- Clothing: Cotton is not only slow to dry, but it loses all of its insulation value when wet.
- The efficacy of a gun on a bear is only about 60%
Luckily for us, Allen provide solutions to all of these problems!
Practicing the proper use of bear deterrent spray.
Perhaps the most surprising thing we saw all day was in the video below on hypothermia. Check out the clip to see Dr. Gordon Giesbrecht purposely ski into a hole in a frozen lake and stay there for several minutes!
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Toolik Talking Shop
This week's Talking Shop seminar featured John Wingfield, a leading expert in Arctic science, who spoke to us about global climate change, environmental perturbations and range expansions. Essentially what John's work centers on is measuring stress hormones in different populations of birds during the minutes after they are exposed to the stress of being captured. His studies have shown evidence of increased stress responses in birds found at higher altitudes and higher latitudes when compared to populations at lower altitudes and lower latitudes. These stress responses have been linked to a number other responses in birds including suppressing reproductive systems. Much of what John is studying involves asking questions about the response of species to habitat changes caused by global climate change (i.e. when limits of a population's geographic range expand to higher latitudes or higher altitudes).
It really is a privilege to hear such well-respected scientists discuss their work!