Thirty glass squares and thirty marble squares prepared by Drake students,Ceramic sign prepared by a Drake student,
One square meter of shade cloth*,Landscape fabric pins to anchor shade cloth*,
Diamond tipped engravers, soil scoops, knife and other tools,Light meter,
Drake High pennant,Dell laptop computer with power and ethernet cables,
Data stick, assorted plug adaptors and modem adaptors, PolarTREC manual,Digital camera with battery charger, spare battery, card reader and cable,
Binoculars, hand lens, compass, global positioning system (GPS) with manual,Two books on Namibia, four scientific articles on hypolioths, one Russian novel,
I am going to Namibia in April! Specifically, to the Namib Desert near Walvis Bay. I'll be there from April 18 to April 25.
Why? And what does this have to do with the polar regions? If you remember my post on this site from March 23 2009, you'll remember that deserts and the polar regions have a lot in common.
Both are extreme environments that appear hostile to life at first, but are full of hidden surprises. Both have beautiful, other-worldly landscapes, remote and empty. Both are fragile environments sensitive to climate change. And, both have hypolithic cyanobacteria.
Cyanobacteria are some of Earth's oldest, simplest and toughest microorganisms. They live in lots of places, not just in extreme environments. However, wherever conditions get really tough you find them under rocks...
University of California's White Mountain Research Station
Improving after a June snowstorm
Back in the USA, I had to hit the ground running.
There were two weeks of school left, including final exams and graduation. My substitute teacher, Mr. Lazlo Toth, had done an awesome job of executing my lesson plans while I was gone. He is a retired high school teacher himself, and he really knows his stuff. I could not leave my school for this long without his expertise. THANK YOU, Lazlo.
It is impossible to overstate how much this trip has affected me. I wrote in my previous post about the importance to the modern world of doing this kind of research. In the end it comes down to that old adage “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
What about its importance to me personally, and to my students? I have learned that...
I usually have a very good sense of direction, because I know the sun rises in the east, crosses the sky to the south, and sets in the west. In Finland at this time of year it is usually cloudy and you can’t see the sun. Even when you can, it just goes in circles and circles around the horizon! There’s no telling which way is north, or even what time it is anymore. I get lost. We have entered the zone of perpetual day. “Yesterday”, “today” and “tomorrow” no longer mean anything.
I haven’t seen the moon or a star in a month. I no longer turn on the lights indoors, even at midnight. The curtains in my room don’t work to keep out the sun while I sleep. I miss the dark.
Northern people just don’t sleep in the summer. They stay up forever. In the winter, they sleep...
Somebody finally asked me why we do this. What do we gain after tromping through the Finnish woods all day, or after finding a few flakes of quartz stone from 5000 years ago? Would it matter if we didn’t do it?
In the short term, the answer is easy. Everything we do and everything we find (and don't find) gets put on maps and written about in reports that are sent to the Finnish National Board of Antiquities. They keep these maps and reports so that anyone can read them in the future.
Next, the graduate students and professors I am here with write articles about the sites and publish them in scientific journals that are read mostly by other archaeologists. This lets other archaeologists know what we're doing, and also helps the graduate students earn their Ph.D.s and the...
I was invited by language teacher Sirpa Walton to visit the Yli-Ii School. Ms. Walton teaches English and Swedish to middle school students. All Finnish school kids study English and Swedish, and some take German or Russian as well. Ms. Walton is Finnish but is married to an Englishman, which is why her last name will sound familiar to my North American readers.
Yli-Ii is a rural community about 40 miles from Oulu. It has a combined elementary and middle school with about 300 students. After they graduate from this place students can opt for high school or technical training in other towns.
I spoke with some middle school students about school in California, and showed them some pictures of Sir Francis Drake High School. They were attentive but shy, as I was told they would...
Finland is famous for modern architecture, particularly the works of Eliel and Eero Saarinen and Alvar Aalto. Finland is less well-known for traditional buildings, but there are some very attractive ones here.
People who know me know which I prefer. But, judge for yourself! Here are photos of ten buildings, five traditional and five modern.
I have tried hard to be fair. Finland has plenty of massive, Soviet-style apartment blocks with no discernable landscaping around them. I have not photographed those. Similarly, Finland has plenty of tumble-down sheds in the woods. I have not photographed those either. Also, I have shown you two buildings from Helsinki and three from Oulu in each category.
Every Wednesday we meet for lunch at the Kierikki Stone Age Center and build a fire inside one of the Stone Age row houses. Or, we cook outside if the weather is nice. We roast makkara (Finnish hot dogs) on sticks over the fire. It’s a lot of fun.
We also take “cookie breaks” halfway through every morning and every afternoon. It’s a disaster if nobody remembered to bring them. For adults in the modern world, we seem to be unusually concerned with where our next snack is coming from. I guess it’s a hunter-gatherer thing.
I like this passage from the Kalevala (see my post from May 8.)
A young woman, just married, is about to leave the home she grew up in and go away to live with her husband’s extended family. It is a tense moment. Her mother lashes out at her unexpectedly:
‘Go along, sold maid with him now, bought hen! Now your hour is close right at hand your time to leave for your leader is by you your dear taker at the doors and the stallion champs the bit and the sledge awaits a maid. Since you were keen on money quick to give your hand eager to become betrothed to try on the ring keenly now get in the sledge eagerly in the bright sleigh quickly get away and like a good girl be off! Young maid, you scarcely glanced to either side or puzzled your...
It is important to understand changes in sea level in order to understand our research here! In most of the world, sea level is rising. That means if you live near the beach, every year the water gets a little higher and a little closer to your home.
Finland is different. Sea level here drops 6 millimeters each year. That’s about ¼ inch. Every 100 years sea level drops a couple of feet! The rate used to be even faster. Five thousand years ago, when the people we are studying lived on the coast, sea level dropped more than three feet every 100 years.
To understand why, you need to think back to the end of the last ice age. Finland and the rest of northern Europe was covered by a huge glacier: a giant sheet of ice over a mile high! The weight of all that ice pressed the...
After two and a half weeks around Oulu, I wanted to see some of the rest of Finland. So, Friday after work and after our lab meeting was over I hopped on the overnight train to Helsinki.
People told me I could fly there for only slightly more money, but they were missing the point. I would have to get myself to the Oulu airport which is miles outside of town. Then I would have to wait around for a while in the airport. The flight would take slightly longer than an hour, and then I would have to get myself from the Helsinki airport into downtown Helsinki. By then it would be late at night, and all the things I wanted to see are only open in the daytime.
Instead, I took the train overnight. Trains go directly from one city center to the next, and there’s no need to wait...
Helsinki is not the ancient capital of Finland. Most of it was built in the 19th century, and so it has that century’s sense of grace and proportion.
More than anything, it reminds me of Boston, Massachusetts where I grew up. It is an attractive, harbor-oriented city great for walking around in.
Naturally, I headed to the waterfront first. I saw so many beautiful boats and ships there that I will have to save that topic for a future post on this site.
The city has two cathedrals, each perched on a hill. They are both higher than any of the other buildings, so they face each other down across the city. The Lutheran one, Tuomiokirkko, is centrally located and is painted an ethereal white with gold trim. The Orthodox one, Upenski Cathedral is an equally massive structure...
Finland is one of the coldest, most northerly countries in the world. By some measures it may be the coldest country of all. Every winter the Baltic Sea freezes over!
Ordinary ships cannot plow through sea ice without help. An icebreaker is a ship specially designed to operate in ice. It is built with a extra-strong bow (front of the ship) and is shaped so that the bow will ride up over the sea ice and then crush it. It leaves a lane of open water behind it.
Every winter these icebreakers go to work, making sure that the ferries and cargo ships can get through from Europe to Finland. If they didn't keep the shipping lanes open, Helsinki and other ports would be closed.
It's May now, so these ships have no work to do.
I am sure that on board these giant ships there are all...
Finland doesn't have quite the maritime tradition that Norway and England have. But, judging from the diverse and beautiful ships in Helsinki harbor, Finland isn't far behind!
Today a vanload of us went on a field trip to Lapland to visit the Ranua Wildlife Park, also known as the “Arctic Zoo of Lapland.”
It is a small zoo that features only animals from Finland and/or the Arctic.
Most of the birds and animals were being lazy the way zoo animals usually do, but this capercaillie was trying hard to kill us through the wire fence. A capercaillie is sort of like a Finnish wild turkey. I found some capercaillie feathers in the woods on May 15 – see my post from that day.
Did you know that the Arctic was named after the constellation called the Great Bear? You probably know this constellation as the Big Dipper. It is named after the Brown Bear (Ursus arctos) that lives in the northern regions of Europe, Asia and North America. Most of the world’s...
A few of us went back to the Hiidenkangas site (see my post from May 18) where the big stone axe was found two days ago. We just walked the furrows left by the heavy equipment, eyes glued to the ground. In one morning we surveyed half the clearing –several acres - and found over 100 artifacts. Try doing that by excavating! We really got a lot of mapping done, and learned a lot about this settlement, thanks to those loggers.
Each time we found something, (mostly fire-cracked rocks and quartz flakes) we put a red flag into the sand next to it. Sam Vaneeckhout would follow us with the GPS unit, marking where it was. The artifacts made distinct clusters on the ground, with large areas where there is nothing. It’s becoming really clear to us that artifacts weren’t moved any...
We found something pretty cool yesterday at the Hiidenkangas site. McGill University graduate student Colin Nielsen picked up a big stone axe head that was sticking out the ground! None of the blade part was showing – Colin didn’t know it was an artifact until he pulled it out. He knew to check because it was the right kind of stone.
It is almost a foot long and has nicely ground surfaces on both sides of the cutting edge. It is made of a kind of green igneous rock called ash flow tuff.
You could use this axe for all kinds of things once it is hafted to a handle: chopping or splitting wood, or cutting holes in ice.
It sure makes me want to go back to Hiidenkangas and just spend a day walking around, my eyes glued to the ground.
Today we went on a field trip to the...
Is Finland the wettest country on Earth?
I know there are places that get more rain than Finland. There are probably even whole countries whose average rainfall exceeds Finland’s. I’m not just talking about average rainfall.
I’m talking about what happens to all that water after it hits the ground.
In most countries rain soaks into the ground and then discharges into rivers that run into the sea.
In Finland, the ground is already saturated, so it can’t absorb any more water. Plus, everything is so flat that the water can’t easily find its way to a river. So it forms puddles and squishy areas everywhere.
If people didn’t dig drainage ditches at regular intervals through the woods, the whole place would be a bog. Even with the drainage ditches, it’s pretty wet underfoot....
Six or seven times now I have been to the Kierikki Stone Age Center in Yli-Ii, an excellent museum and center for research and education on this area’s prehistory.
Outside the museum building are dozens of pits in the ground that were foundations of row houses for the hunter-gatherer people who lived here about 5000 years ago. Down on a sandy beach by the river the Center’s staff has reconstructed several of the row houses as they might have looked.
Who were these people? We don’t know everything about them. For the lack of a better name, I will call them the Kierikki People. Their culture is also called comb ceramic culture because they made clay pots decorated by dragging a comb across the surface of the wet clay before firing.
We do know that they were hunter-...
When the day is done, we’re not really “done.” Most evenings we meet in the University of Oulu’s Archaeology Laboratory after dinner.
It is a pleasant place with a skylight, lots of tables, computers, and books, and chemistry supplies.
Mostly we meet here to process information. Archaeology is full of numbers.
Every site has a number to identify it. Within a site, each location has numbers telling where it is. Every soil core has a number, and several samples (numbered) are taken from each core. Every sample gets analyzed – more numbers! Every sample was collected at some depth beneath the Earth’s surface. Everything has to be dated, photographed, and described. The photographs are numbered. There are tables of information to be transcribed, correlated, recorded, and...
Today we began to uncover a large and impressive site on a hillside in Haukipudas, north of Oulu. It has at least fifty pits! Each pit represents a dwelling. Plus, the site is “loaded” with artifacts: you can see quartz flakes, quartz cores (bigger stones from which flakes were removed) and piles of fire-cracked stones that represent hearths all over the ground. Five thousand years ago the site was on a sandy beach near the river mouth, next to deep water, protected from the waves by a small headland and backed by forest. It’s easy to see why people lived there.
This site is called Hiidenkangas which literally means “Heathen’s Clearing” but has a connotation sort of like “Devil’s Hill.” Apparently the locals understood that the pits were dug by prehistoric people, and didn’t...
Northern Finland has very little of the monumental public architecture from past centuries past that we expect to find in England, France, Germany, or even southern Scandanavia. Most of it looks more like Alaska than Europe. Everything is modern and utilitarian.
A happy exception is Oulu Cathedral, easily the most impressive and most visible building in town.
Built in the 19th century, it isn’t medieval. But its proportions and color are pleasing to the eye and well suited to its site.
The inside is spacious, cool, quiet and comfortable.
Back to archaeology tomorrow.
The Arctic Circle is an imaginary line that circles the North Pole. North of this line, there is at least one day each year when the sun never sets, and at least one night each year when the sun never comes up.
We don’t live on the Arctic Circle in Oulu, but you can almost see it from here! Today we went on a field trip to Rovaniemi, a small city in Lapland.
We spent some time at the Arktikum, a museum of northern culture that I found similar to the acclaimed Museum of the North in Fairbanks, Alaska (see my post from February 24.)
A few miles north of Rovaniemi the road crosses the Arctic Circle. There is a steel monument over the road that features a beam pointing 23 1/5 degrees into the sky – this is the highest the sun can ever get in the sky at this place.
There was...
One of the best parts of the Kalevala (see my post from May 8) is in chapter 3 when young Joukahainen comes to challenge Vainamoinen to a singing contest. He introduces himself by crashing his horse-drawn sleigh into Vainamoinen’s sleigh:
shaft seized on shaft-end traces tangled with traces hames were jammed with hames and collar-bow tip with tip. Then and there was a full stop a full stop, a pause for thought… sweat poured from the collar-bow from the shafts steam rose.
The old Vainamoinen asked: ‘Of what kin are you coming foolishly forward this way recklessly smashing the hames of bent wood the collar-bows of young wood my sleigh to splinters into bits the toboggan?’
Then the young Joukahainen uttered a word and spoke thus: ‘I am young...
We have glimpsed moose (Alces alces) a number of times now, but not up close and not for long. They are fast-moving, shy creatures. They don’t necessarily stand around and pose while you get your camera out.
Probably the moose have had better success at watching us. The woods are full of them and full of their signs.
The English call moose “elk” which is really confusing to everybody because in North America there is a totally different animal (the Wapiti) that goes by that name. Finns call it hirvi. Also, Scandanavian moose are a different subspecies than North American ones, and have slsightly smaller antlers and a shorter neck.
Today on survey we didn’t find any new Stone Age sites, but I’m not complaining. We could feel the presence of moose all around us. There were...
I accompanied Eva Hulse and Greg Korosec while we went back to the new Stone Age site that Dustin’s surveying team discovered on Monday. Although it was only a few degrees above freezing when we stepped out the van, the sun shone steadily all day and by afternoon it was in the sixties. A truly glorious day in Northern Finland.
Sometimes we were able to follow hunter's trails or deer paths towards our destination, and sometimes we just went cross-country.
There were about a dozen large obvious depressions in the ground that mark the foundations of pit houses. Many of them seem to form an orderly line parallel to a high ridge of sandy soil. On the other side of the ridge, the land drops steeply off towards the West. This was the seashore 5000 years ago, and it was on a high,...
Four large groups of Finnish school children were descending on the Kierikki Stone Age Center and both the Director and the Curator were away. I agreed to help out in the Stone Age Village for a second day.
As each group came, I demonstrated how to make slate beads while one of the other guides translated. Then we turned them loose to make beads. It was fun.
After the school groups left I had time to visit “the Thing” to see how the geological investigations were going.
Remember from my May 11 post that “the Thing” appears to be a doughnut- shaped ring of earth about the size of half a soccer field on the south side of the Iijoki River. Riding in the van to the Thing with Professor Andre Costopoulos of McGill University, I learned a lot:
The Thing is similar to a...
Today in keeping with the educational and public outreach mission of PolarTREC I spent the day as a guide at the Kierikki Stone Age Center in Yli-Ii.
This involved dressing up as a stone age person and helping Finnish 5th graders make pendants out of slate. It takes about half an hour of drilling with a sharp piece of quartz to make the hole in the slate. You can also grind the slate piece on a slab of rock to shape it if you want.
We also boiled water by dropping heated rocks into it and did a little target practice with a bow and arrow.
It was a lot of fun! They have four large groups coming tomorrow, so I’m going to do it again.
This morning we went on a tour of Stone Age settlements. Three of our leaders, Eva Hulse of the State University of New York at Buffalo, Jennifer Bracewell of McGill University and Sam Vaneeckhout of the University of Oulu showed us some of the places they have excavated in the past. This was partly to give us new people a context for our work, and partly to show us what a stone age settlement looks like so we can start surveying.
A Stone Age settlement is indicated by one or more shallow depressions in the ground. These were the foundations for pit houses. Often there’s a spot in the middle where the vegetation is especially lush because of the extra nutrients from the fireplace ashes. Once in a while, stone flakes or pottery shards are visible.
Jennifer Bracewell showed us...
It is Sunday, and we have the day off. Also, it is Mother’s Day and in Finland that's a big national holiday. All of the restaurants, stores, museums and other attractions are closed up tight. There are no cars on the roads. There is hardly a person to be seen. They must all be home, having coffee with their mothers. They can’t be anywhere else.
There is a bicycle in my apartment, and although I don’t know the owner a note has been left in English that invites me to use it. OK, it’s true that the seat is too high and the crank case wobbles and makes an alarming squeal if I pedal with any force. It’s a one-speed with coaster brakes. But, it should get me downtown at least so I set out.
Oulu is a cyclist’s paradise. There are wide paved bicycle paths that go from any place...
Today we paid a quick visit to one of the many stone age settlements we have found in the woods. With me in the van were Professor Ezra Zubrow, Dr. Eva Hulse, graduate students Dustin Keeler and Greg Korosec, and undergraduate students Sarah Billiar and Loretta Sun, all from the University of Buffalo.
There are a series of shallow depressions in the forest floor that most people wouldn't notice at all. To the experienced eye of an archaeologist, however, they reveal themselves as the foundations of pit houses. Some are as long as a school bus.
Five thousand years ago (more or less) this place was on the coast. The land here has been rising ever since the glacier melted at the end of the last ice age and removed all that weight that was pressing the land down.
Yesterday we removed...
PolarTREC teachers are called upon to do a lot of things. Some of us sleep in tents on the ice and shoot polar bears with tranquilizer darts. Some cut up glaciers with chain saws. Plenty have jumped into the Arctic Ocean without a wetsuit. But, I’ll bet I’m the only one to go grocery shopping in Finland…
Alone.
Within an hour of arriving.
Not having slept since yesterday morning.
And then find the way back to an apartment on the third floor of a building that looks like all the other buildings on a street whose name I think begins with “K” (but so do all the other streets.)
People on the team are showing up a few at a time and my roommate hasn’t arrived yet. My ride had to rush back to the airport for another pickup. So, I thought I would make myself useful by buying a few...
I’ve been reading the Kalevala, which is called “Finland’s national epic.” It reveals a lot about Finnish culture because it isn’t anything like other epics such as the Odyssey or Beowulf.
Its characters are strictly local heroes, not acting on a national or international scene. All the action takes place in the “Kaleva district”, a mythical place you won’t find on the map, and in “Northland” or the “North Farm” which is a few days travel from the Kaleva district. (Although some people believe that these two places stand for Finland and Lapland.)
Also, there is very little fighting. More than once when a fight is imminent somebody opts for negotiation or magic instead. What fighting there is, is personal. It’s rarely organized enough or premeditated enough to rise to the...
Finnish is unlike any other language you are likely to know. Nearly all of the languages in Europe belong to the Indo-European language family and so are all cousins to each other. They share many root words in common, and have similar structures. English, German, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Greek, Gaelic, Hindu, Urdu, and Sanskrit are all examples of Indo-European languages.
Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian belong to a totally different language family, the Finno-Ugric.
Finnish has 15 cases for nouns (I don't even know what that means) and over 160 conjugations for verbs!
With the exception of a few words borrowed from Swedish, this means that Finnish is not just mostly unintelligible – it’s completely...
We had our first team meeting on May 8 at the Oulu University main building café. Eighteen students, researchers and teachers from at least six countries were present. Three universities are involved: the State University of New York at Buffalo, McGill University in Montreal Canada, and the University of Oulu here in Finland.
The topic of our research is long-term human adaptation to climate change in the Arctic.
We use computerized climate models, ancient plant pollen from sediments, and other proxies for climate to learn how the climate was changing just below the Arctic Circle five thousand years ago. Then we survey and excavate ancient living sites to find out how people lived, and how their lives changed as the climate did. We don’t know the answers in advance. We...
We went to this place near Baker called Little Red Hill. It is a Mars analog site.
The rocks are all dark red, like Mars.
There isn't any quartz. But, when you turn rocks over you find bright green cyanobacteria living underneath! How can they get any light, living under dark rocks?
The answer is evident when you break one of these rocks open. It is sparkly white marble inside, as bright as sugar. The red is only a thin iron oxide crust on the outside. These rocks transmit plenty of light to their undersides, and the undersides of the rocks are moister and cooler than the top surfaces.
Most hypoliths found in the Arctic and Antarctic were under white rocks like quartz. Maybe we should look for this kind of hypolith in the polar regions too.
This is a story about how a brilliant hypothesis proposed in the evening can go down in flames the next morning, and also a cautionary tale about technology.
Cryptogamic crusts seem to grow in regular patterns. Lumps of black cyanobacterial stuff an inch or less across are separated by about the same distance of bare soil. It is difficult to see why cells that are microscopic feel the need to grow in regularly spaced clumps, but they do.
We know that biological patterns like these require both positive and negative feedback mechanisms. Last night in one of our assemblies, somebody suggested that water retention was the reason.
It seems so reasonable! The big lump gets wet in the rain, takes longer to dry than bare soil, and so all the cells benefit. Immediately several teams...
Today we went to Death Valley National Park and stopped at Badwater, which is the lowest place in the Western Hemisphere.
It looks lifeless, but there is a thriving community of eukaryotic algae and cyanobacteria growing in a layer several millimeters below the surface of the salt crust. Eukaryotic organisms have cells with a nucleus and organelles - they are completely different from cyanobacteria which don't have them.
The salt crust transmits light but traps moisture below the surface, keeping the algae hydrated. Also, the white upper surface of the salt crust reflects a lot of sunlight in the middle of the day, keeping the algae cool. Even an inch down, the soil is noticably cool to the touch.
So, the algae are happy down there being moist, cool, and partially illuminated...
On the way back from Death Valley we stopped at an outcrop of rocks from the Crystal Springs formation. These rocks are Precambrian in age, over a billion years old! They are mostly marble.
Embedded in them are lovely examples of Stromatolites. I've never seen any like them before. Stromatolites are dome - shaped fossil structures made by cyanobacteria. The cyanobacteria grew as a thin mat on an underwater surface, and the filaments of the bacterial mat trap grains of sediment. A new layer grows over the older, sediment-choked layer, and the layers build up into a dome.
Nowdays, cyanaobacteria do not form these dome structures. They get too much competition from green algae, and too much grazing by animals like snails. In the Precambrian, there were no green algae or snails. ...
So, the undersides of my quartz rocks are green - but how do we know it's chlorophyll? Some minerals are green.
University of Nevada graduate student Lauren Lacroix kindly let me use her Ocean Optics USB-4000 visible/near infrared spectrometer to make sure. This instrument is simple: you shine light on the rock and analyze the spectrum of the light that reflects off it. If it contains chlorophyll a (there are several kinds of chlorophylls and other photosynthetic pigments) then the spectrum shows a big peak in a characteristic place.
Chlorophyll a is the most common photosynthetic molecule. My rocks do indeed have chlorophyll a. A green notebook cover showed no such peak.
Tomorrow we will be making batteries out of bacteria and mud!
Nothing can live in sand that's being blown around by the wind. There's too little moisture, nothing to eat, and constantly varying temperatures and light levels as the grains get buried and then uncovered again. At least that's the consensus opinion of all the experts who were with us today.
These dunes are less hospitable to life than most areas of the Arctic and Antarctic.
Of course if you collect a sample of sand you will find bacterial cells and spores in it, but those were blown in from somewhere else and are not residents. They aren't growing.
I am sure that deep inside the dune, though, the conditions are more favorable. We found that the surface temperature of the sand was 31 Celsius (pretty warm) but just a few inches down it was only 12 degrees.
The desert and the arctic have a lot in common:
Both are extreme environments that appear hostile to life at first, but are full of hidden surprises,
Both have beautiful, other-worldly landscapes, remote and empty,
Both are fragile environments sensitive to climate change,
And, both have hypolithic cyanobacteria!
I am here in Zzyzx California, inside the Mojave National Preserve, with over fifty other scientists, students and teachers to participate in a program called Spaceward Bound. Funded by NASA and lead by NASA scientist Chris McKay, it is best described as astrobiology field camp.
Astrobiology means studying life in extreme environments in order to understand how to find life on other planets like Mars.
Today we saw lots of cyanobacteria in the...
In January and again today we were visited by Dr. Pascal Lee, Chairman of the Mars Institute, NASA scientist and polar explorer. He spoke to us about the challenges and opportunities of Mars exploration and his project on Devon Island in the Canadian arctic. Dr. Lee has visited our school over six times in recent years, and has helped us with our Mars Project.
In April Dr. Lee will drive on the sea ice the length of the Northwest Passage from Kugluktuk to Devon Island on his new vehicle, the Moon-1 Humvee Rover. The Northwest Passage is a fabled sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific via the Arctic Ocean.
The purpose of this event is to deliver the rover to Devon Island and to do some scientific investigations along the way. It will be a historic event! Nobody has ever driven...
Acting on a tip from a friend, I invited myself into basement of this gift shop even though it was nine o’clock at night. Talk about fossils! There are literally tons of extinct steppe bison bones, woolly mammoth bones, mammoth tusks, moose antlers, whale baleen, and just about every kind of large animal part you can imagine. And, a few you probably can’t imagine.
The proprietor cleans and polishes them, carves them into art pieces, or just sells them as is.
This is the third time in a week I have encountered steppe bison fossils without even trying – see my journal posts for February 26 and 24. The bison must have been extremely common around here. This area was never covered by glaciers during the last ice age. It was a cold dry grassland, as was floor of the shallow...
Most buildings in Fairbanks are big, boxy, and unimpressive. It doesn’t help matters aesthetically that they are really far apart, and that the city is so flat. There are a few surprising exceptions, though. Here and there on the side streets you can still find a log cabin. The Museum of the North is beautiful and remarkable.
But the main thing is that the low angle of the light and the clean white blanket of snow make everything look interesting.
In the lower 48 states, we don’t often think about where our gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel and heating oil comes from. A lot of it comes from Alaska.
Much of America’s oil reserves are underground on Alaska’s north slope, the flat area along the coast of the Arctic Ocean. There is only one road that goes there, and it isn’t paved. Anyway, it’s too expensive to transport crude oil by road. Mostly we use ships called oil tankers.
However, oil tankers can’t go to the north slope because of the sea ice. So, in the 1970’s Alaska built a pipeline that goes 800 miles from Prudhoe Bay on the north slope to Valdez, which is an ice-free port on the Pacific Ocean. From there, it is put into oil tankers and shipped to refineries in California and elsewhere.
Building the pipeline...
This afternoon I paid a call on Pat Holloway, Professor of Horticulture at the University of Alaska and Director (and founder) of the Georgeson Botanical Garden. I wanted to ask her advice on a science project we are doing at my school which involves growing plants in a very cold environment. Horticulture is the science of plant cultivation.
Professor Holloway was amazingly nice to me. She gave me several hours of her time, took me on a tour of her greenhouses, answered all of my questions, gave me some books and magazine articles, and even drove me back to the hotel afterwards.
It is a wonderful experience to step in from the snow and enter one of her greenhouses. Suddenly you are in a colorful and luxuriant jungle. I saw figs, a coffee tree (!?), tulips, goldfish, and...
Many aspects of daily life here are just like anywhere else. There are a few differences, though. For example, parking lots in Fairbanks have these electrical outlets you can plug your car into. Your car has a little electric heater which keeps the engine block from getting too cold. That way, you can start it again even if it’s -40 degrees F.
A lot of people here live in homes called “dry cabins.” That means they have no running water! You drink water from a jug, shower at work (most work places have showers), and wash clothes at a laundromat. This is because permafrost and low temperatures make it really challenging to build water pipes that don’t freeze.
People here eat meat. I haven’t met any vegetarians.
And, the buildings are really warm inside. Sometimes too warm...
There's something magical about the way light interacts with ice that just makes you happy to see it.
Even though it was very late and I was tired, I just never wanted to leave these sculptures.
Back to technology training tomorrow - I wish it was training in ice sculpture instead.
Ever wonder what it is like to go inside permafrost? Well, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers did, and bored a tunnel. It is the only tunnel like it on this continent.
Today we went into the permafrost tunnel. The walls of the tunnel are made of loess, which is dusty rock flour ground by glaciers and transported here by the wind. Also inside are wedges and lenses of pure ice, and lots of fossils from the Pleistocene epoch, tens of thousands of years old. I saw bison bones, tree roots, and sedges.
Permafrost is soil with permanantly frozen moisture. However, global warming is starting to take the "perm" out of permafrost and melt it. This is a problem, because about a third of the planet's organic carbon is locked up in permafrost. Melting the permafrost releases the...
Today I saw lots of animals in this beautiful place.
For starters, the thousand-mile 2009 Yukon Quest sled dog race, from Whitehorse to Fairbanks, was won by Sebastian Schnuelle this morning in downtown Fairbanks. He finished in just under ten days. I watched the first two teams come in and took these photos.
The staff of the Arctic Research Consortium of the United States made lunch for us, including plenty of roast moose. It was wonderful.
Then we went to the University of Alaska’s Large Animal Research Station to learn about musk oxen, caribou and reindeer. Caribou and reindeer are almost the same, but caribou are wild and live in North America while reindeer are semi-domesticated and live in Scandinavia. When I go to Finland, I’ll see reindeer.
We visited the University...
This week I flew to Fairbanks, Alaska for a week of training to become a PolarTREC teacher. I am going to Finland in May to participate in an archaeological dig! We will be digging up prehistoric hunter/gatherer settlements.
On the flight to Fairbanks I sat next to a "real Alaskan." He has lived here for 59 years, which is longer than Alaska has been a state. He worked on the Alaska pipeline the first day it was started. He has a cabin in the woods that he can only get to by plane, where he has to wear mosquito netting and watch out for bears. He hunts moose, fishes, and picks berries there. He is also a recreational gold miner, an ex-bush pilot, and owns a small fleet of trucks and bulldozers. In short, he has done just about everything you associate Alaska with. He...
