With the long drive to Toolik on the Dalton Highway I had Christina as a captive audience and was able to ask (and re-ask) several questions about what we had been doing over the last couple days. With all of this being so new to me, I needed a couple days of seeing the science in action before I could really start to understand what was going on – there's a lot, so I won't cover it all in this journal – more to come later.
The overarching purpose of the project is to measure "Winter Respiration in the Arctic." What this means is that the team is trying to measure the movement of carbon from the ground to the atmosphere. I'll talk about why in a later post. But that's the basic gist of what they are doing.
What is really interesting is HOW they are doing it. The team had to create monitoring stations and devices that overcame three major challenges of doing research in the Arctic.
Challenge #1: Access
First of all, to get the needed data you have to get to the areas you want to monitor. Traversing the Arctic is not easy. Roads are limited and in poor condition. Even if a road can get you close to the location, you will need to hike over the tundra which can be wet, deep, and slow to move on. Additionally, any disturbance leaves a mark on the landscape (walking across the tundra even once can leave a path). You just can't carry much equipment very far by hiking. Helicopters help, but they are expensive.
Helicopters at Toolik Field Station make it easier to access remote locations.
Tundra boardwalks also make things easier to reach (even in the snow!).
Challenge #2: Weather
The Arctic is COLD and has many temperature and weather extremes – it can be wet, cold, hot, sunny; who knows. Because of this, getting measurements in the winter is difficult. Measuring equipment must be able to continue working in extreme cold and high moisture (snow, rain, or flooding). Oh yeah, and survive a bear/fox/lemming who might want to chew on it just to make sure it doesn't taste good.
Challenge #3 Power
The tundra doesn't have wifi, and it definitely doesn't have electricity. All the measurement equipment needs electricity, but devices are engineered to use as little as possible. But regardless, you will need to find a way to power up all of this heavily durable remotely placed equipment.
More on Challenge #3 and some #deepthoughts on failure: To solve Challenge #3, stations run on two 12 volt batteries that are re-charged by a solar panel. Let me tell you – hauling a 50lbs. battery through a forest or tundra with just your arms is not easy – I can speak from experience. In the summer, for the most part, the solar panel can re-charge the batteries enough to run the equipment at the monitoring station – but in the winter, when the sun is limited (remember that Arctic has ~ 24 hours of sunlight in the summer – it also has ~24 hours of darkness in the winter) and snow may cover the panel, solar energy isn't always enough.
Plenty of light. :)
Limited light. :(
One interesting thing I learned about this project is how they were able to change and make adjustments as they went along. In education lately we've been talking a lot about teaching students about failure and how we need to model for students resiliency through failure. One thing I think we need to do is reframe failure – many times failure is just testing a hypothesis and getting a negative result, which isn't really failure – because you need to try something to find out it doesn't work. The project initially set up each station with two batteries – a reasonable assumption based on what they knew and previous field experience. But after one field season, the team found out not all the stations where able to make it through the entire winter. All stations turned back "on" once the snow melted and the sun shined for longer hours – but for some stations in more forested areas two batteries weren't enough to gather data all winter. So the team pivoted and added a third battery when needed – this winter will let them know if that is enough. Thinking back to the ideas of failure, I personally wouldn't call this a failure – it's the scientific method. You have an idea, try it out, and adjust based on results. So maybe when students fail we should congratulate them on testing a hypothesis and finding out that method didn't work.
Teachers: How have you been dealing with building resiliency and re-framing failure in your own classrooms?
Tomorrow I'll discuss the specific equipment at the monitoring sites.
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