This was my second year working with the KBP group. So when reflecting on this summer there are a lot of comparisons that I naturally make. Last year was a summer of transformation for me - I felt that I came home from a journey of both scientific and personal discovery. This year was more transitional - no big discoveries about myself and rather the opportunity to build upon the things that I had learned the year before. Last year, I arrived in Russia without clothes, without a single clue about Cyrillic or the Russian language, with little or no understanding of the culture, having only met the other participants once or twice, and with only a rudimentary understanding of the objectives of the project itself or the nature of working in the Islands. In general, this year I knew more...
So we had the whole day in Seoul, Korea. Colby and Ben decided that they wanted to hang around the hotel for the day, while Mike and I decided that we would find out from the concierge how to get to downtown Seoul to do some sightseeing. We found out that it was pretty easy - take the hotel shuttle bus back to Incheon airport, runs every 15 minutes; catch the 601-2 bus to downtown, it stops at door 12A and runs every 20 minutes; get off at Gyeongbokgung station downtown. The trip would cost 8000 won, or about $8, and take about an hour each way. We set out at about 8 am, armed with our map and about 90,000 won, on our adventure in Korea.We got downtown about 9:45 and headed for the Gyeongbokgung palace, about a 5 minute walk from the bus station. It was a partly overcast day, but it...
Did I say it was a trip of 40 hours...turns out to be a little bit longer (depending on where you call "home")!On the morning of Wednesday, August 22, Colby, Ben, Mike and I got up at our usual time of about 6:30 or 7 am. We ate up some of what remained of our food - oatmeal, some milk, dried fruit, cheese, sausage - and had some coffee or tea. Then we got to work getting ready to go. We had to finish packing and thoroughly clean the apartment. Our flight was at 4:40 pm, so we knew that we would be picked up sometime around 2 pm. We were still waiting for the paperwork, etc from Russian Customs for our 7 coolers and 4 crates of samples that we wanted to take with us back to Seattle. Each container weighed the maximum 30 kg that we could check as baggage on the airplane -...
For my last journal from Russia, I thought that I would summarize a bit of my experiences and observations of living in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk for a week at each end of the expedition.
Shopping
In general, shopping is more tedious in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk than in the United States. One reason has to do with transportation (see below), the other with the way that stores are organized here.
First, in all of the stores, things are behind the counters and you must ask the clerk for them. This makes shopping more difficult when you don’t speak very much Russian…BUT generally the things that are available for purchase are displayed under the glass or in the window, with their price, so you can easily point to them. And at every store they have a calculator to show you the total in case you don’t...
Well, most of the work that we need to do before we head home for Seattle has been accomplished. Colby, Bre, Matt, Mike, Ben and I have spent the last three days at the Sakhalin Regional Museum counting, cataloging, organizing, sorting, checking, verifying, cleaning, photographing and making inventory lists of ceramics, wood, bone or lithic tools, faunal materials, lithic flakes, samples of carbon, sand and tephra and field equipment/gear, including tents, boots, tools, spare sample bags, life jackets, shovels, trowels and first aid supplies.
Whew!
We needed a finalized list/count of all of the lithic flakes, faunal material, carbon samples and sand/tephra samples that would be headed back to Seattle with us by Friday afternoon so that Dr. Shubin could take it to the Russian...
On August 11, at about 7 pm, we saw our last of the Kuril Islands as the Iskatel-4 lifted anchor shortly after the small field crews were returned from Rasshua at around 6:30 pm and we headed south before turning west to cross the Sea of Okhotsk on our way back to Korsakov. Compared to last year, it had been a short field season (about 20 days compared to by about 16 days), but a very productive one. We had found and mapped known and new archaeological sites and gotten good work done at three major archaeological sites and 4-5 tsunami sites, and that was just the American crew!
But while the field work was complete, our work is far from done…..
We arrived in Korsakov harbor at about 6 am on August 14, but had to wait until shortly after 8 am for the harbormaster to tell the Iskatel’s...
Misty and the team are on the Iskatel again and are heading back to the Port of Korsakov. Listen below for an update!
We awoke to a relatively warm and sunny morning – the skies were still clear, we could see both of "The Kichas” and it wasn’t windy. After breakfast, Mike and I packed for another day of climbing, hiking and digging and awaited our zodiac ride to shore.
We landed nearer to the direct southern end of Ryponkicha this day and while the climb up was a bit less steep, it was also a bit longer. After "fox proofing” our life jackets and boots by placing them inside a large, thick plastic bag and piling beach boulders on top of it, we began our ascent.
We have just finished working at the Ushishir Group, which includes two small islands, Yankicha to the south and Ryponkicha to the north. They are what remain of the catastrophic explosion of the Ushishir volcano that occurred about 9500 years ago. Yankicha is the caldera remnant and Ryponkicha is a narrow island only separated from Yankicha by a shallow channel. Last year we spent half a day on each island, digging test pits on the north end of each.
In the test pit that I helped dig on Ryponkicha we found some bone midden (see my August 10-11, 2006 TREC Journal for more details), so Mike Etnier and I were going to return to the same location and dig a larger 1 m by 1 m excavation unit to recover a bigger, more organized sample of material, collect charcoal samples from the cultural...
The following is Part 3 of Matt Walsh’s edited and abridged Personal Journal for August 2-7, 2007, recounting his surveying exploits with James Taylor and Dima Chvagian in the North Central Kuril Islands. All photos, unless otherwise note, are courtesy of Matt Walsh.
Matt Walsh
August 6, 2007
This morning the storm was still with us when I woke up around 7am. The rain had become little more than a drizzle, but the wind and waves were trying their best to make up for it. After breakfast there was an impromptu meeting in the galley to formulate some sort of plan and try to decide what to do with the day. The captain suggested that we stay aboard ship, discouraging us from heading out to survey because of the nasty weather, but he conceded that it was at least physically possible to...
August 6 is Bre’s 25th birthday! Everyone on the island of Matua was invited to a party to start at 7pm at the geology shore camp. (Okay, so that’s only 12 people that we know of…) The day dawned sunny and clear just as Bre had asked for … she just left out one detail – wind.
We set out "early” – 9 am – for Ainu Bay with a full plate of tasks that we wanted to accomplish - re-measure Profile 2 and take tsunami deposit samples. Yes, that IS only two tasks, but it would take us the entire day.
We hiked over to Ainu Bay to find that it was just as sunny and clear on the Sea of Okhotsk side, but it was also EXTREMELY WINDY! Not the "Ah, this is a nice brisk, refreshing wind” kind of wind, more like the "OUCH! The wind is sandblasting my face!” kind of wind. Bre uttered "Holy Crap!” on...
Misty and the team have been surveying Matua Island and are finding fascinating clues from past tsunamis! Transportation to the next field site has been stalled due to an incoming typhoon. Listen to the audio journal below to learn more.
Misty is out of satellite phone connection until approximately August 7 or 8, so stay tuned for more pictures and journals!
At about 3:30 am this morning, it started raining. I mean REALLY raining. Not the Seattle-winter, consistently precipitating all day, kind of rain – more like monsoon-wind driven sideways, solid sheet of water, drench you to your skin in a millisecond through your 4 layers of clothes, the outside one being supposedly impermeable, kind of rain.
Luckily for Bre and for me – our tent, surprisingly, given that we could only pound our stakes halfway into the ground due to volcanic cinders, withstood the challenge and was still standing, though being whipped to and fro as it strained against its tethers at 7:30 we decided that we better get up. We got dressed and during a well-timed brief respite, quickly made our way down from the terrace to see if the cook/work tent and Jody’s tent were...
The following is Part 2 of Matt Walsh’s edited and abridged Personal Journal for August 2-7, 2007, recounting his surveying exploits with James Taylor and Dima Chvagian in the North Central Kuril Islands. All photos, unless otherwise note, are courtesy of Matt Walsh.
Matt Walsh
August 4, 2007
Woke up this morning at 7:50am. The first thing I heard was that after breakfast the ship would steam to Ekarma Island and that in little more than an hour we would be heading to shore. James and I both grumbled as we got ready.
James does his best Norman Rockwell pose after breaking our only full-sized shovel. Afternoon, August 4th. (Photo courtesy of Matt Walsh)
James does his best Norman Rockwell pose after breaking our only full-sized shovel. Afternoon, August 4th.
The day was...
Today, the most frequently-heard words out of Bre’s mouth were: "Holy Crap!”
We began the day with our typical breakfast of leftovers and/or muesli with milk. Then we got our gear together and hiked over to Ainu Bay, which is on the south-west side of Matua, on the Sea of Okhotsk side. Last year, at about this time, most of the geology group, including Tanya, Katya and Bre, camped here for 3-4 foggy days, measuring profiles and making excavations. We greatly hoped as we hiked that the fog would lift enough to be able to take a photograph of the beach to compare it to ones that we took last year. We thought this would be Jody and my last day on Matua and our last opportunity to see Ainu Bay. The single biggest mistake that we made was deciding NOT to take a tripod and the nivelier...
The following Journal describing the archaeological activities at the Drobnyye excavation site on Shiashkotan Island has been generously contributed by Mike Etnier.
In addition to the main archaeological work our team conducted at Drobnyye, I was able to spend a bit of time developing, and starting to test, a range of other hypotheses related to the natural resources available to the folks who lived here over the millennia.
Some of the most conspicuous inhabitants of the Kuril Islands today are the foxes.
A red fox checks out the ¼” screen that we use to recover archaeological materials from excavated sediments. (Photo courtesy of Mike Etnier)
*A red fox checks out the ¼” screen that we use to recover archaeological materials from excavated sediments. (Photo courtesy of Mike...
The following Journal describing the archaeological activities at the Drobnyye excavation site on Shiashkotan Island has been generously contributed by Shelby Anderson. All photos are courtesy of Shelby Anderson.
Shelby Anderson
Shelby Anderson
August 2 to August 7, 2007 – Drobnyye, Shiashkotan Island
We arrived at Drobnyye, our second excavation site, mid-morning on August 2nd. The tide was out so unloading all of our gear on the kelp-covered rocky beach was a bit tricky, but also fun as we watched the harbor seals and red fox that were curiously eyeing us from both the shore and the sea. Our camp and excavation site is located on Shiashkotan Island near a freshwater stream that drains into the Okhotsk Sea. The stream made camping convenient for us and was likely one of the...
The following is Part 1 of Matt Walsh’s edited and abridged Personal Journal for August 2-7, 2007, recounting his surveying exploits with James Taylor and Dima Chvagian in the North Central Kuril Islands. All photos, unless otherwise note, are courtesy of Matt Walsh.
Matt Walsh
August 2, 2007
Woke this morning at 6am and got everything packed and checked in preparation for heading to shore and surveying today. I went with Mike and Shelby into the hold in the foredeck and gathered up some sample bags of various sizes and one of the expedition tents for James and me. It’s looking as though we won’t need a tent, since the plan so far sounds like we will be returning to the ship each night to eat dinner, sleep, and steam to another smaller island each day. It sounds pretty cushy,...
Today I learned how to determine where recent tsunamis have been. It is kind of like a tsunami Easter egg hunt.
Tanya, Katya, Jody, Bre and I headed north along the beach to the furthest cape that we could see from camp – about 1.5 km – to try to measure the run-up and inundation, or height and distance inland, of the recent tsunamis and measure topographic profiles every 250 meters along the beach.
In November 2006 and again in January 2007, there were significant earthquakes (larger than magnitude 6.0) off the Pacific coast of the Kuril Islands in the Kuril Trench. Each of these earthquakes produced a tsunami as indicated by tide gauges on Sakhalin Island, Kamchatka Peninsula and at other locations farther away. The KBP geology group has a tremendous opportunity both to measure the...
It seems that I am still having trouble with the motion of the ship…I spent the evening of July 31 and the morning of August 1 in my bunk…. Bre gave me some of her Bonine though for motion sickness and that combined with smoother swell has made it so that by breakfast time, I was mostly up and around.
Today was a day of many plan changes. Originally, the plan was for us to spend one day at the Ushishir Group of Yankicha and Ryponkicha as we headed north toward Shiashkotan. Then the plan became to spend two days at Ushishir. I was slated to head to shore both days with Ben and Mike to do a larger test pit excavation at the archaeological site that Ben and I visited last year on the north end of Ryponkicha. It looked to be a wet cold day for a zodiac ride – as it was raining pretty...
Misty has sent us another audio journal describing the past week's geology research and tsunami exploration on Matua Island. Tomorrow Misty and the team will get back on the ship to head south and she will be uploading journals and photos from the last week to the PolarTREC website.
Communication from the Kuril Islands is still challenging. As you will hear, this particular audio journal was composed of three different satellite phone calls, where she was cut off and had to phone back in. The sound quality and volume also varies due to the changing quality of the satellite connections.
This was our last day at the site and there was still quite a bit to do. There was still some excavating to complete and all of the final documentation of the site to do – and it takes a LOT more time than I had anticipated!
But before we could begin our last day of work – Ben, Mike and I headed down to the beach at 5 am, stirred up the campfire and waited for the satellite phone to have a signal so we could call in to the Webinar. We managed to get a signal around 5:15 that lasted about 13 minutes! We hope those of you that called in enjoyed the webinar and if you missed it – check out the archive!
Our departure time was "after lunch”. The day before, Shelby and I had worked to finish cataloging and tagging the last of the samples and artifacts as they came down from the site and...
Listen to Misty Nikula, Ben Fitzhugh, and Mike Etnier by clicking the Audio links below. Calls from Ben and Mike are cut short due to poor satellite phone communications. Learn more about how a satellite phone works here.
First is a 2:50 minute description of the most recent archaeological findings from the Kuril Islands by teacher, Misty Nikula.
Next is a 1:15 minute description of the Kuril Island Biocomplexity Project research goals by Dr. Ben Fitzhugh of the University of Washington.
Finally listen to a :37 second recording from Dr. Mike Etnier of the University of Washington, about why they decided to revisit this region of the Kurils.
Visit again for more updates from the Kuril Islands!
These two days were our longest, hardest days of work as we tried to finish up the excavation work before our scheduled departure from Simushir on July 31.
A view of our commute to work at the Vodapadnaya Field Camp. Colby Phillips is climbing the path up the 42 m high terrace that leads to the excavation site. On the left you can see the waterfall that gives the site its name – Vodapadnaya means “Place with waterfall” in Russian.
A view of our commute to work at the Vodapadnaya Field Camp. Colby Phillips is climbing the path up the 42 m high terrace that leads to the excavation site. On the left you can see the waterfall that gives the site its name – Vodapadnaya means "Place with waterfall” in Russian.
The excavation site had changed quite a bit...
Hours of hard work went into finishing up the excavation at the Vodapadnaya site this week. Misty and the team got back on the Iskatel and are moving on to some new locations! Learn more by checking out the photos and audio journal below!
James Taylor and Matt Walsh work on drawing a stratigraphic profile map of the eastern wall of Unit 1 at the Vodapadnaya excavation site, while Bre MacInnes looks on and provides geologic clarification of the tephra layers.
James Taylor and Matt Walsh work on drawing a stratigraphic profile map of the eastern wall of Unit 1 at the Vodapadnaya excavation site, while Bre MacInnes looks on and provides geologic clarification of the tephra layers.
Ben Fitzhugh and Valery Shubin take photographs of the cleaned walls at the Vodapadnaya excavation site...
