13 July, 2001

Friday

More field work today with every one out at their different sites collecting data. At the end of the afternoon we helped Glen at his site collect markers, which were placed in his plots as part of last season's investigation.

Tomorrow Hyojung and I fly to Atkasook, 60 miles south of Barrow, to install the sonic anemometer that monitors carbon flux on to the tower there. It has been broken and was sent back to the manufacturer in England. The tower has not been active for the past 3 weeks. Everyone is looking forward to having the tower operating again. Three weeks is a long time to not have data for.

We will stay at a house in the village that is rented out by BASC ( Barrow Arctic Science Consortium) and made available to all the science groups who have to overnight there. The group across the hall from us from University of Michigan just returned from there and said it's warmer and the mosquitoes are out in force. We expect to stay overnight and return on the Sunday afternoon flight. While Hyojung is installing the sonic instrument I will be recording the soil moisture and thaw depth measurement along the tower transects. This will be my only chance to see an inland village on the North Slope.

Everyone else in our group will be out at the Point on an archeological dig tomorrow, Saturday. One of the scientists here, Ann Sheehan, is working for the next week on a dig site and hoping to uncover artifacts from the whaling era and before. I hope to go out sometime this week and help out also but didn't want to give up my Atkasook trip.

Sitting down on the job! When you are looking for things on the ground here that's the only way to do it! The water bottle behind is how Glen gets the water out to his site. The white board is where we are placing the markers we are presently collecting.

We have been watching the Snow Bunting who nested here for the past month. Yesterday we visited and found 4 little faces staring at us.