Look At Me Still Talking When There’s Science To Do

In Grand Rapids… thinking about Barrow (among other things)

Archive for biomass

I just want to eat some butter.

August 11, 2008 at 4:16 am · Filed under Barrow and tagged: , , ,

One team member is throwing up, one team member gets dizzy when looking too hard at something, one team member is getting a virtual haircut, and one team member is not sleeping more than six hours a night on average because there are too many things to like about Barrow.

There are still 16 plots of point framing left, along with Total Season measurements, the mere mention of which made our veteran team members twitch and make weird noises. I don’t think we’re going crazy, exactly, but there have been saner times.

The science juice turned out to be as delicious as everyone expected (because we are so great at science). It was a perfect compliment to the science cheese and science midnight-veggie-burgers that some people so enjoy around here.

No, I don’t eat veggie burgers, how absurd! I don’t really eat breakfast, either, because I have better things to do and I really love it when Jobby pounds on my door in the morning because he has some ants in his pants that seem to be encouraging him to go out to the field.

Who would want to eat anything, really, with such amounts of dirt underneath the fingernails? The Barrow wet site biomass proved to be especially dirty and obnoxious- just like some bloggers I could mention!

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Two blokes and a ****load of cutlery.

August 3, 2008 at 5:00 am · Filed under Research, atquasuk and tagged: , , ,

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.

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Sky blue. Like the sky. With jet fighters and lightning.

July 17, 2008 at 2:33 pm · Filed under atquasuk, travel and tagged: ,

In other news, Jeremy and his grandiose schemes continue to disappoint. This time he PROMISED that Atqasuk would be magical, warm and fun… I believe the word he used was “phantasmical”… and it rained all day yesterday. It rained on our luggage, it rained on the truck, it rained on our food boxes, it rained on the airplane, and it rained on the other truck. The trucks entered the rainstorm covered in dust, and my new Earnest Science skills lead me to believe that this is how they ended up covered in mud. The new box of Otter Pops got a little muddy. (We got a hot tip from a rogue Loon Person that The Kids had managed to steal the stockpile we’d flown into town last time, so we had to restock.)

It rained so thoroughly that the internet connection was down. We had to entertain ourselves in other ways. My favorite way was coloring (good thing I had 100 crayons on my person), but my second favorite was beating the rest of the team at a rousing game of Texas Hold ‘Em.

Now we’re off to kick some Biomass butt. Vroooooom! (That’s the sound of the ATV carrying us away… though all four of us AND the point frame are going to be on the same ATV, so vr-oo….ooo…OOOmmm…mmm…… might be a more appropriate onomatopoeic representation.)

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If I ever write a book about my life, you will take up FOUR chapters.

July 16, 2008 at 7:20 am · Filed under Barrow and tagged:

Well, we made it. I won’t say that we made it in one piece, since the four person team was only a three person team for the celebratory midnight dinner in town. I hope we didn’t break Jean’s spirit.

The 25+ gallons of tundra from the Barrow dry plots are all safely sorted into neatly labeled bags. They await weighing and drying, which will commence tomorrow. We wanted to get the sorting done tonight because now we can set up the drying tables tomorrow morning before we fly to Atqasuk. This is why I said that we “made it.” I work better with a deadline.

This work, of course, was only for one-quarter of the biomass plots. We’ll have six more plots each for Atqasuk dry and the respective wet sites. Jeremy thinks we shall begin to go faster, but he is an impossible optimist. He is also endlessly excited about going to Atqasuk again. (This is particularly evident in his blog, which is conveniently linked on the far right of this page.) If I didn’t know better, I would be expecting a vacation palace and all the free time in the world. There is reason to be excited, though. Rob and Jean are coming to Atqasuk this time. Now I won’t be stuck in a house alone with a vegetarian.

The vegetarian ordered a veggie burger without pickles for midnight dinner that turned out to be a regular burger with pickles. I tried my darnedest to convince him to eat it, but no such luck. Burger? Good. Pickles? Good. Midnight dinner? Very good. It was sent back to the kitchen and replaced with tomato, avocado, and lettuce on a bun. Even with the sauteed mushrooms and onions that virtually volcanoed through the top of the bun, I feel that this is a silly excuse for a dinner, never mind that volcanoes of any sort are almost impossible to eat. A burger it was not. Also, it still contained the offending pickles. Which I commandeered. Thereby nearly becoming an onion-volcano casualty.

I get to sleep in tomorrow! Don’t tell our professor. Flight at four. Don’t tell the fog. It may try to hinder our journey.

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It seemed like a good idea at the time.

July 15, 2008 at 5:04 am · Filed under Barrow, Research and tagged: , ,

No matter what I do, no matter how hard I try, it is never enough. Despite being the best point frame partner the world has ever seen, able to hold five pieces of data error-free in my head while writing the plot points that SOMEONE neglected to put on the data sheet, Jeremy insists on treating me in an abominable fashion. The latest torture is the BIOMASS PROJECT.

I was held hostage in the lab for 48 hours this weekend, receiving only the occasional bathroom break or Rice Krispe Treat (of which we have fifty-four). My task: to take 25 one-gallon Ziploc bags filled with tundra and sort the vegetation while also removing roots, rocks and dirt (all below-ground materials). One pile of mosses, one pile of lichens, one pile for each species of vascular plant (maybe a dozen or so), one pile of leaf litter, and one pile of poop (all sorts), all suitable for weighing, drying, and then weighing again. Big Shot Jeremy decided to do twenty-four 70 cm x 70cm plots instead of the usual 10-25 cm size. He expects such perfection that we are at times driven to tears (for which there is no acceptable pile).

…that’s what I would report if Jeremy actually were that mean, and he is not. Not quite. We did get sleeping time and eating time, including a delightful team-bonding dinner at Sam and Lee’s, one of the few restaurants that we had not yet visited. It was, drumroll… Asian-American Cuisine. However, the appetizer tray actually included fire, and good times were had by all.

The vegetation is a pain in the you-know-what to sort, but we are getting slightly lazier better at it.  A mere six-and-three-quarters gallons remain! Sometimes we pass the time by listening to comedians, sometimes we watch Arrested Development, sometimes Jeanie plays her Marilyn Manson tunes, and sometimes we just play the Full Circle Game, the rules of which I will not detail here. (Rob is losing. Or maybe he’s winning? It’s impossible to tell.)

Other times we talk. The rules of talking include: laughing with one’s face pointed over one’s shoulder so to not scatter the piles with enthusiastic bursts of air from one’s nostrils. Better yet, don’t laugh. Don’t make your team members laugh. There is no room for levity in Earnest Science (the opposite of Lazy Science).

Our recruitment efforts succeeded in gaining only one helper for Sunday afternoon, but he was enthusiastic (and a new person to talk to). Frank is another PolarTREC teacher, like Elizabeth (to whom we said goodbye on Saturday!), and he is working with the archeology team out on the point. They are doing Lazy Science. Or Lazy Archelogy, same concept. You can tell because they have Sundays off.

Presently I am enjoying a working internet connection and a little investigative Googling in lieu of sleep. This is certainly a bad idea, but I will sleep when I’m dead. Or maybe in September. No lazy science here.

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