After the past month in Siberia, my thoughts focus on the remarkable vision of the Polaris Project, on the extreme difficulty of doing Arctic research in Siberia, and on the remarkable people I met…
On our last full day (so the schedule would have us believe) at the Northeast Science Station, I am reminded of our first full day here. It’s the weather. It snowed on us then and it snowed on us…
Over the last two days, many of us accompanied the researchers out to collect any nonpermanent sampling equipment, place long-term equipment to gather data over the next year until the Polaris…
To me as a teacher, one of the most rewarding aspects of the Polaris Program is watching mentoring relationships develop between students and researchers from the same university. Taking education…
I had a chance to talk with Seth for a couple of hours on one of the first days at the station as we waited for a sampling team at Shuch’ye Lake. Immediately, I was impressed by Seth’s intellect and…
Today, I accompanied Brandi Jo Petronio and Peter Ganzlin to the forests just beyond the experimental burn plots, where they are jointly conducting their research project. Their research centers on…
For our final large group adventure, we headed north at about 10 p.m. on Wednesday, June 18, our Barge being pushed by a tugboat in a similar fashion to our trip to Duvannyi Yar. This time, our goal…
The university students of the Polaris Project each work on independent projects. Periodically, I will share the stories of these remarkable young people.
Dylan (left) and Lindsey sport winter fur…
Having spent the last three days working with the drillers to make a borehole in Pleistocene Park, we are just barely over halfway down to our goal of reaching 15 meters deep. However, in the words…
In talking to my new friends on the permafrost drilling team, they corrected me as to my perspective of the science of drilling. Drilling, they said, is not science, it is simply collecting the data…
What was it like to live in the time of the mammoths? How was the environment different then? What animals lived then, and what was their ecosystem like?
It’s hard to go back in time (really hard…
Here’s a question: What is this?
A curious, almost artistic pattern. What is it?
Sometimes a new or larger view really helps put things in perspective:
The larger view shows the delta of the…
