In Barrow, the plants average a couple of inches tall. In Atqasuk, the plants average over foot tall! The shrubs are huge and sprawl out all over the place! They have thick, woody branches. The inflorescences spread out to be almost golfball sized, where as in Barrow the inflorescences appear to be smaller than a pinky finger nail. The mosquitoes are real and they are jurassic and gargantuan. They swarm you constantly. There's millions of them and that is not an exaggeration. I'll write more about the Atqasuk Tundra tomorrow--but I will say that hiking it is a definite experience.
The Eriophorium vaginatum is huge in Atqasuk...and there are mosquitoes aplenty. They're pretty big too. How many Eriophorium vaginatum plants and mosquitoes do you see?
The mosquitoes seem to like our jackets. I changed the photo to black and white to show them better. They make a really loud collective buzzing sound, which is almost more annoying than them biting. This is why everyone wears their headphones and listens to music in the field. Jeremy's iPod battery died in the field last week and, well, he's remembered to charge his iPod every night since then!
In Barrow, the sun will set for a few minutes over the Arctic Ocean on August 2. However, since Atqasuk is sixty mile south, the sun will set here tonight and will stay beneath the horizon for one hour and eleven minutes. Sunset will be at 2:01 am and sunrise will be at 3:12 am. We are going to the Meade River to watch the sunset and we might even go fishing and build a fire. After tonight, the days will shorten by about a twenty minutes each day. I'm kind of sad to see the sunset because even though it's been hard adjusting to the 24 hours of daylight, I like the sun. The sunset makes me realize that winter is coming, that the days will be short and the nights will be long. But, it will help me ease back into the world of day and nighttime cycles.