This post is long overdue – at least a month! I didn’t have much time to relax after my expedition, as school had already started - the journal below is a quick recap of our last two days of…
After making it down the Dalton and arriving in Fairbanks, the crew immediately disassembled our materials, stored them in an office at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and headed to take a…
With all of our roots injected, plucked, sorted, packed and shipped, it was time for the Deep Roots team to take a short hike before we headed back to Fairbanks on the Haul Road one last time. Here…
Symbiotic relationships are super common in nature – just think of Nemo and the anemone that he made his home. It may seem hard to believe, but plant roots have this same relationship with certain…
After 3.5 days of sorting through above ground and below ground samples, the team starts to make mistakes. And not the “I’m tired and I spelled Betula nana wrong,” more like “I’ve been looking at…
A mere 24 hours after injecting the permafrost soil with 15N (and it was a short 24 hours, given how many hours we had worked the previous day to inject those soil plots), the team was out in the…
In the last post, Dr. Becky Hewitt injected an isotope of Nitrogen (15N, to be precise) deep into the ground, where the active layer meets the permafrost. Special metal tubes were used with small…
So just what is the Deep Roots team doing while we’re up here (or more scientifically, what is the experimental design)?
Choosing a representative sample
The tundra behind the field station…
Did you know that there are versions of some of your favorite plants here in the Arctic too? I’ll try to keep the science to a minimum and just post some pretty photos, but let’s at least get a few…
In order to fully understand the Deep Roots experiment, there are a few things to review about plants (and how the Arctic places limits on plant growth). Sure, we all know the basic parts of a plant…
The Elephant in the Room
A significant portion of the research here at Toolik is either directly or indirectly connected to climate change. Some experiments are mainly focused on how this Arctic…
Variables
All scientific experiments can ultimately be boiled down to two very concrete parts: the independent variable, or that which the experimenter manipulates (the treatment) and the dependent…
