Peggy's Weather Report from Mica Lake Time: 10:16 am Temperature: 23.1 C 73.7 F Humidity: 55% Wind: none Clouds: none Cloud Cover: none Light level: off scale
Peggy's Weather Report from Mica Lake: Time: 3:30 pm Temperature: 26.7 C 80 F Humidity: 50% Wind: 5 km/hr from West Clouds: none Cloud Cover: none Light level: off scale
I usually sleep very well wherever I am. But last night I hardly slept a wink. When I got up this morning at 6:30 am I had a sore throat and felt a bit weak. A good breakfast of Caleb's coffee and grapenuts with milk and raisins helped immensely. I was better but more like 75% of my normal energy level.
We took the boat out to do short sediment cores after breakfast. There were some successes and some losses, but Caleb got the core he needed for his project after about two hours of work. The ropes we had were not ideal for the job, but with two teams out in the field at the same time, each team had to sacrifice a little. We brought the core in and we helped Caleb prepare it.
Caleb looked over last year's photographs and wanted to take identical photos at certain locations so we went back to the temperature logger and the inlets and outfalls at the end of the lake where we saw the bear the yesterday. That end of the lake is really beautiful and would have made a great place for setting up camp, flatter for setting up the boat and fewer rocks to trip on, but the pilots told Caleb it was too difficult to drop us off here so we weren't able to camp there.
After visiting the sights Caleb wanted to photograph, we started a two hour plankton tow. The temperature felt as hot as a summer day in Kingsburg (100 F) and we each decided we needed to jump in the lake to cool off. How refreshing the dip was and I felt much better after the cool dip.
Caleb was hoping to find diatoms that he could do oxygen isotopes analysis for his project. We found the larege red copepods that we had found before, but not nearly as many and this was a two hour tow and the first one was only one hour. We tried to figure out why there was such a differnce. The major difference between the two tows besides two vs. one hour was the time of day. The one hour tow was carried out at 6 pm and the two hour tow was at 2:30 pm. CopepodsCopepods are a type of small aquatic zooplankton found in either fresh or salt water. To see pictures of Calanus hyperboreus, Calanus glacialis, Calanus finmarchicus, and other zooplankton click here. eat diatoms, so maybe diatoms increase with the number of hours of daylight. Just a thought for now. DiatomsDiatoms are one of the most common types of phytoplankton. Most diatoms are unicellular, although they can exist as colonies in the shape of filaments or ribbons. Diatom communities are a popular tool for monitoring environmental conditions, past and present, and are commonly used in studies of water quality. are much smaller than copepods and Caleb brought a new with a 20 micron mesh this time. At Hallet lake the mesh was much larger, probably too large for diatoms which range in size from 20 to 50 microns.
Caleb tries to get through to Trail Ridge Air to see if they plan to pick us up tomorrow. The weather forecast had predicted rain.
After returning and processing and packaging the plankton for travel, we took a two hour break before dinner. It was hot and I wrote for awhile and took a nap. By dinner I was gaining my strength back. We decided that tomorrow we would hike up the hill to look for evidence in the granite rocks that showed any indication of glaciers having been there during the previous 10,000 years. We were also flyng out tomorrow afternoon so we would be packing up for our flights in the morning.
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