Through the weeks that I have been in Northern Alaska, my experiences out in the field have been immersing myself with various arctic projects that my team is undertaking. Oftentimes, researchers go to the most remote places in the arctic to conduct their research. This involves hiking for miles in the rough terrain tundra of the arctic. Other times, we take boats onto the water to conduct ocean studies.
PolarTREC Fellow, Monica Nuñez, and Dr. Craig Tweedie navigating the Beaufort Sea..
I had the opportunity to be on a boat conducting benthic sediments studies through Long Term Ecological Research (LTER). This project is funded by the National Science Foundation and can be traced as far back as 1978. For more information click here. This massive project continuously adds sites to advance the gathering of data and drive ecological, planetary research forward.
A benthic sediment core from the Beaufort Sea.
Within the LTER, my team has recently started to monitor the Beaufort Lagoon Ecosystem project (BLE-LTER). For more information click here. Dr. Vanessa Lougheed, who is the institution lead for the University of Texas-El Paso, speaks in the video provided about the role that the team plays here in Utqiagvik, Alaska. It feels meaningful to learn and interact with the researchers involved about the science that they are conducting in the arctic.
Dr. Craig Tweedie & Dr. Christina Bonsell extract benthic sediment from the Beaufort Sea.
Dr. Christina Bonsell is the project manager for the BLE program. She joined the team for about a week to conduct her research of the seafloor. Dr. Bonsell studies the benthic material that exists in the ocean. This material consists of the organisms that inhabit the bottom of the seafloor. Her goal is to see the trends in species that survive in such extreme environments such as the arctic. She wants to know what species can withstand vast changes in temperature and salinity that exists when the arctic changes seasons. I was fortunate to be able to assist her in the gathering of this benthic material. Dr. Tweedie and Dr. Bonsell used a box grab sampler (ponar) to extract mud from various locations along the Beaufort Sea for data collection. We were covered in seafloor mud by the end of the boat trip. This experience served to further my own understanding of how all the research projects in the arctic are tied together for the same scientific purposes.
Dr. Christina Bonsell & PolarTREC Fellow, Monica Nuñez, prepare benthic sediment for transport.
Add new comment