Look At Me Still Talking When There’s Science To Do
In Grand Rapids… thinking about Barrow (among other things)Archive for atquasuk
And all this science… I don’t understand.
Being the responsible persons that we are, Rob and I not only got ourselves down to the lab on Saturday in time to rescue our posters and personal effects, we also managed to be at the conference location in time to do 14 laps around the Van Andel Institute in our efforts to find the (wrong) parking garage to park in.
I expected that the only rewarding thing about a conference was socializing with other people who you’d want to see anyway… and maybe the free food, because how bad could it be? I was then pleasantly surprised to be enjoying both presenting my poster and talking with the other students who had posters to present. Our conversations were pleasant, informative, and exciting. I was inspired to continue investigating the topic of my poster, since the preliminary data that ended up on the poster only scratched the surface.
I didn’t mean to imply, when I wrote last week, that I did not understand my own research when I confessed that I didn’t have the title committed to memory. I knew very well what I put on that poster, because I put every bit of it there (nevermind that once it was there Bob was wont to move it around and change this word for that word… in fact, the large pictures were his idea: “Put a giant picture in the middle so people will want to look at it”).
Using the Atqasuk pointframe data and zonation schemes established by other people, I labeled each species of vascular plant that we found at the site as either “high arctic” or “low arctic,” referring to latitude. High arctic plants can also be found in low arctic zones, but the low arctic species will not be present in high arctic zones.
What we expected to find was that the point frame data would indicate more cover from the low arctic plants in the OTCs. We were looking for evidence that climate change and warming would catalyse these species in spreading northward. What the data told us was that in the dry site of Atqasuk, there was less cover inside the OTCs, and at the wet site, there was actually an increase in cover for HIGH arctic species.
Because this was unexpected, there are now a hundred more questions to ask, and there are always more data to analyse. We only used the point fram data from Atqasuk 2007, so the Barrow data that Papasaurus and I collected (and that I entered into spreadsheets!) wasn’t used yet, nor was the data from past years. Once those spreadsheets are run, we can compare them individually and to each other. I might start looking at specific plots and their change over time, rather than lumping all the hits for all high arctic species in all dry control plots together, for example.
Besides THAT, I have been getting more of the books and articles I requested from the library, and I will use them to find other zonation schemes that I can use to classify our species. The classification system we used is relative and somewhat subjective, so it could be that a different zonation scheme will yield different results!
The West Michigan Regional Undergraduate Science Research Conference has the worst acronym of all time, apart maybe from any acronyms that spell out unfortuate words. However, clumsy acronym or no clumsy acronym, I thought it a great success.
So be good for goodness’s sake!
My sources say that when a little Atqasuk child is naughty his little Atqasuk grandmother will warn him that his punishment will be to come back as a caribou in his next life. Caribou are feasted on by mosquitoes in the summer and are forced to eat nasty lichens in the winter. No one wants to be a caribou.
Bad guy got run over by a caribou!
Merely saying that Jeremy and I were in the field for more than 27 of the 42 hours between Friday at 6 and Sunday at noon does not quite capture the enormity of what Team Efficiency accomplished this weekend. Add on travel time and prep time and one will quickly deduce that we didn’t really sleep more than five hours a night.
Exactly what we accomplished is as follows: wet site total season (marked individuals), dry site total season (marked individuals), wet site total season (largest reproductive), dry site total season (largest reproductive), leaf collection (three leaves times two species times twelve plots times two sites), other leaf collection (fifteen leaves times two species times six plots times two sites), specific leaf area index leaf collection (ten leaves for each species we study in Atqasuk), removal of soil probes, soil sampling for two different researchers, thaw depth on all 96 plots, OTC removal and disassembly, remarking the boardwalk, taking pictures of each plot, transplant growth measures, seed collection (one species from every plot), cleaning out and taking down the tent, staking and stringing the biomass plots, cleaning up the lab, packing away the equipment… oh yeah, and we started the marathon weekend with collecting phenology data, just like we always do.
I’ve spent nearly the whole ten weeks and never even explained that last bit! For each of the plots I have at the wet site (24 control and 24 with OTCs (open-topped chambers) I have a spreadsheet printed out with spaces to fill in the general status of the vegetation in the plot. As events happen in the plots I write down the date. We record information for each species both for the plot in general and also for three marked individuals of each species in the plots. For example, I observed that in experimental plot eight, Eriophorum angustifolium individual four had green leaf on J169, inflorescence on J169, open flower on J170, withered flower on J175, seed set on J188, and seed dispersal on J201. I did not observe leaf senescence for this individual, though there were Eangs in the total plot that were in this state on J228. Making these kinds of observations is easier when you only saw the plots every ten days or so (like we did), but it is clearly more accurate to check more often (like Rob and Jean did).
While everybody and their brother was seeing polar bear after polar bear in Barrow this weekend, Jeremy and I had to be content with the company of the reincarnation of Rob’s ground squirrel and a few pesky caribou, one of which nearly ran us over and seriously interfered with the science*. It was… charming?
We never would have succeeded in our race-against-time to hop a plane that didn’t know we were coming without the help of Wondrous Bob. Of course, without Wondrous Bob to add several things to our to-do list, we might also have been a bit less stressed.
It was a pleasant kind of stress, and we were pretty happy with ourselves and our accomplishments, like the hoity-toity researchers that we are. We were also happy that the airplane, which we made with twenty minutes to spare, did not reject us.
*Tripped on a string and broke a stick.
Go to the bushes. Take someone with you.
I have only one more trip to Atqasuk. This pleases me. I like Atqasuk, but we go all the time, and I prefer Barrow without question. It doesn’t help that the rainy weather renders the two highlights of Atqasuk (fishing and ATVing) much less appealing.
Oh yeah, and I don’t fish! And I will not disgrace myself by driving the ATV. Jobby and Jeanie do an admirable job of scaring the poop out of everyone. Besides the knee-bruises I have from my precious boardwalk, I now have you-know-where-bruises from our riding excursions.
Atqasuk then becomes a child-infested internetless rain prison on weekends like the one we just had. I mean, I know it’s my own fault if I am bored, but… there are not as many opportunities for adventures.
Not for NEW adventures, anyway. We went fossilling again, among the largest shrubbery that the North Slope has to offer. Dangerous pastime. Makes for heavy baggage. But I had an order to fill from a UTEP person, and I ended up with some nicer fossils than I had before, so win/win. Come to think of it, I haven’t delivered that fossil yet.
I am spending my last sixteen days soaking up as much Barrow as possible… sometimes until later in the night than I ought when breakfast closes at 8:30. For the record, I do not see this as a problem. The rest of my foster family has yet to yell at me, so I’m in the clear so far.
I know there are other things I meant to explain for posterity, but I can’t think what they are just now. I am all over the place lately. Well, right now I am in Barrow. In the lab. Sorting plants, as soon as I finish typing.
Two blokes and a ****load of cutlery.
The official report read: Today the ground squirrel succumbed to high-velocity lead poisoning. I hope I am not stealing Jobby’s thunder here, as those are his words and his deed, but I do enjoy reporting things! Bob told us to shoot it if it was messing with the Science, and as it was seen digging up the graminoids and eating Jeanie’s bugs, some of us felt that it qualified for a special delivery bullet. “Some of us” are not vegetarians.
That’s about all there is to report. We are in Atqasuk. The kids came to visit… I tried to count, but cannot get a more accurate count than “14ish.” In other words, too many.
Speaking of killing the ground squirrel, we killed a few other things today. Plants. After point framing a 70 x70 cm square, we snipped them off at ground level and packed them into environmentally-unfriendly Ziploc bags. This is called “collecting biomass.” In the dry sites we refer to it as “making tundra cake,” and we get much pleasure from carefully removing delicious slices of inch-thick sod from the mighty tundra, but at the wet sites the act is more like a haircut, and the five-and-a-half inch blades of the kitchen knives we purchased from the trusty Stuakpaq are not nearly as useful as the bumble bee scissors.
I don’t know about my teammates, but I always feel a bit guilty desecrating the plants in this fashion. We also, at the request of Bob, are helping out some scientists that we’ve never met from across the country. These people have asked us to do things like insert soil probes into our plots, probes which made a horrendous tearing sound as they sliced through the root structures of our science. The other audacious researcher told us to pick leaves from plants inside the plots- the very idea! However, we grimly did as we were told… weeping all the while.
I’d like to go back to Barrow, but I am getting work and sleeping done here, so what more can I ask for? I have my health. Well, I do now. There are little to no lingering effects of my illness of last week. I’m sure the bulk of the credit for my return to health should go to Hiroki, who kindly presented me with a water-resistant paper crane. I feel ever so much better. Well, my finger hurts a bit, but that has more to do with the fact that I cut it with the bumble bee scissors than with my general health.
Could I BE wearing any more clothes?
I’ve been wearing matching socks for a whole six weeks now. Normally I have more important things to do than make sure that both socks I grab from my jumbly sock drawer are the same color or pattern (though I do try to match height and weight, for reasons of sensory symmetry). In Alaska my dedication to Earnest Science has prevailed, and I wear matching footwear.
The rest of my wardrobe tends to be rather more brightly colorful than that of my companions, as I am outfitted with yellow, periwinkle, and green while the rest of the team wears black, navy, or deep red. The crayon-print pajama pants and star-print hat in particular have earned comments, but my colleagues promise that they are not embarrassed to be seen with me…
In any case, (for me) gearing up for the field is usually a matter of deciding what three or four layers to put on- in order of how big they are and with no particular regard to color combinations. Today was no exception, though it was not the chilly Barrow field I was anticipating, but the less-than-24-hours Aqasuk trip that Jeremy and I were attempting. We were trying to go light on luggage but I was fearful of freakishly cold wind, so I just wore my field gear onto the plane.
Fortunately, Atqasuk was warm and sunny, and the rain on the horizon went around us. So did the caribou, though he was dreadfully curious- we could tell. All our field work was done after we got out to the field at three and before we were back in at nine. It would take five field days of suffering for those chumps at the Barrow site to finish everything-HA.
Oh yeah, and I’m sick. The head-cold variety. It’s not too bad, on account of the fact that I am incredibly tough. Don’t tell the rest of the team that I’m feeling poorly or they will think I’m weak- when really, it was THEY who said, “Oh, Jenny, poor Jenny, don’t you want to stay in from the field today? You look ever so ill. A day off would do you good- and of course we would stay in with you… for safety.”
I won’t let them have the satisfaction!
