Submitted by Anonymous on Mon, 07/21/2008 - 15:53

Hi Dr. Etnier,

Why did you choose to go on these expeditions to the Kuril Islands in the first place?                                                                                         from Alex Stedman Laughing

KBP Team

Alex -
We picked the Kurils for a several different reasons. The goals of the project (see journal entry for 17 July) were originally developed with some sort of volcanic island chain in mind. All of the main researchers work primarily in the North Pacific, so that narrows the field down to the Aleutian Islands or the Kuril Islands. The land ownership in the Aleutians is a very complex mix of state, federal, and native corporation holdings. And ship time in the United States is extremely expensive.
The University of Washington had previously run a biological sciences expedition in the Kurils (called IKIP, for the International Kuril Islands Project), so much of the framework for a project like ours was already in place. And, finally, IKIP invited an archaeologist along on two of their expeditions (1999, 2000), so we were very keen to expand on the small amount of work we had completed back then.
--Dr. E.