Staff return to Summit Station's Big House during a spring storm. Photo: Katrine Gorham

Due to high winds and low visibility on the ice sheet, a scheduled flight to Summit Station, Greenland, has been cancelled today. The flight would have brought additional personnel and supplies to the outpost to prepare for the busy summer research period. An advance team arrived on Thursday and has begun turnover with the staff of five who have been maintaining ongoing experiments since early November.

Saturday’s forecast calls for improving conditions, though continued high winds may keep the staff grounded in Kangerlussuaq for another day. Stay tuned.

Comments (0) Feb 03 2012

A sumptuous feast, including Beef Wellington, marks the end of Phase II and the beginning of Phase III winter operations at Summit. Clockwise from front left: Katrine Gorham, Tracy Sheeley, Ben Castellani, Lance Roth (in the knit cap), Phil Austin, Christy Schultz, Tommy Cox (or Tommy's hair anyway), Ben Buchwald, and Shannon Coykendall. Photo: Ben Toth

A Norland Air Twin Otter plane on skis landed at Summit Station today, delivering staff, materials, and fresh fruit and vegetables. A staff of five, isolated at the station since early November, welcomed the advance team to the remote research outpost on Greenland’s icesheet.  It’s “a full Big House,” commented station manager Ben Toth, referring to Summit Station’s iconic main building. “It’s nice to have some new faces around.”

Let the transition begin! This Norland Air Twin Otter brought Summit staff (and freshies!) to the station. Photo: Ben Toth

The Twin Otter paused only long enough to deliver passengers and cargo before flying on to Kangerlussuaq on Greenland’s west coast. Additional CPS staff are waiting there to assist with Summit’s transition and/or staff the station until it opens for the summer research period in April. Weather permitting, the Twin Otter will fly this team to Summit tomorrow before flying back to Iceland.

Summit Station is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation in cooperation with the Government of Greenland. It is managed by CH2M HILL Polar Services.–Kip Rithner

Comments (0) Feb 02 2012

Comments (0) Feb 01 2012

Yukimarimo. Photo: Shannon Coykendall

A late December bedecking of Yukimarimo around Summit Station seemed like “a present befitting the season,” wrote Ben Toth, whose team is keeping the NSF-funded research station and its ongoing experiments running through mid-winter.

“These little snowballs occur when fine frost layers form on the snow surface at cold air temperatures,” Ben explained. “These balls form due to weak wind conditions and become mobile, like little tumbleweeds across the surface, collecting in pockets sculpted by drift or in footprints.”

Ben says the team of five “finished off the year with a productive week sandwiched between the two holidays. Christmas Sunday was celebrated with the requisite Christmas tunes, a lit tree, decorations, and a Kiwi-style meal of “good tucker.” Rack of lamb and pavlova was on the menu as was roasted squash (the very last) and amazing maple syrup pies.

“New Year’s Eve was celebrated [with] a plethora of appetizers. . . . The tapas-themed meal segued into a comfortable evening counting down to 2012. All hands made it to midnight but retired shortly thereafter, rising somewhat later than usual on New Year’s Day to spectacular light and clear weather bringing in the new year.”

For more on Yukimarimo, visit http://homepage3.nifty.com/takaokameda/index.html)

Tumbled snow or Yukimarimo at Summit Station, Greenland. Photo: Shannon Coykendall

Comments (1) Jan 02 2012

Dangerous ice conditions in Davis Slough off the Tanana River in early December. Ice conditions like this make traveling along rural Alaska’s icy lakes and rivers hazardous. Photos courtesy Knut Kielland

Each winter as the temperatures in Alaska dip well below zero, the frozen rivers and lakes become highways and byways for many rural Alaskans. Just a short distance outside Fairbanks, one of Alaska’s largest cities, the lack of traditional roads and bridges reminds one just how rural and rugged a large part of Alaska is. With few traditional roads, many rural Alaskans navigate the seemingly frozen bodies of water on snowmobiles and dog sleds.  And all too often they come in contact with dangerous ice.

This is something ecologists Knut Kielland and his colleague Bill Schneider, an oral historian, know all too well. Kielland and Schneider, both avid dog mushers and researchers at University of Alaska, Fairbanks (UAF), have been criss-crossing the Alaska countryside along the Tanana River outside of Fairbanks for nearly 25 years. During that time the two have certainly run into their fair share of dangerous ice, but there were several unusual phenomena associated with dangerous ice that piqued their interest.

Knut Kielland came up with the idea to study the phenomena behind dangerous ice while dog mushing. Here he is guiding his team through overflow on the Anaktuvuk River on Alaska’s North Slope.

Degrading Ice

At 584-miles long, the Tanana River is a natural force that cuts through the landscape of central Alaska. During the winter the Tanana River exhibits a wide variety of dangerous ice conditions, ranging from overflow (water on top of the ice surface covered by dry snow) to shell ice (ice with air pockets underneath). “The most insidious ice condition is degrading ice,” Kielland said. “This condition refers to ice that forms normally during freeze-up and represents a safe travel surface in early winter. However, as the name implies, degrading ice exhibits dangerous thinning during mid-winter even at very cold (-30°C) air temperatures. The physical mechanisms behind this phenomenon and the distribution of such ice conditions are a major focus of our project.”

With support from the National Science Foundation, Kielland, Schneider and a multidisciplinary team of researchers set out to study and map the physical conditions behind winter dangerous ice conditions, as well as document local knowledge and observations across a 200-mile study area near the Tanana River. The data from the project will help scientists understand the forces behind dangerous ice, and give rural Alaskans tools that may improve public safety.

A Complex Issue Needs a Complex Approach

Kielland wanted to study dangerous ice from multiple angles, including human interactions with this natural force. To do that, Kielland paired teams of natural scientists with oral historians and ethnographers to take a holistic approach.

“In terms of the multidisciplinary approach, we’re talking about climatology, hydrology and the physics of snow and ice—that’s the natural science part. In terms of the social science, it’s both the science of going about how to collect oral histories and learning about how residents view and experience their environment, and more directly in terms of how they experience the changing winter conditions, particularly in regard to snow and ice conditions,” Kielland explained.

Sam Demientieff of Fairbanks inspects ice degradation in Moe Slough, February, 2010.

Community Involvement

Involving local communities in the study area has been a key part of the dangerous ice project.  Many of the villagers and townspeople have traveled the frozen rivers and lakes for decades and have valuable knowledge and insight that machines and computers simply can’t duplicate.

To gather data on how locals call upon years of experience and training to frame their descriptions and evaluate ice conditions, Kielland looked to his longtime friend and oral historian Bill Schneider to record interviews with locals. Having lived and worked in Alaska for decades, it was relatively easy to tap the wealth of knowledge about rural Alaska’s frozen highways.

Residents of Manley Hot Springs meet to discuss the ice conditions along the river trail between Manley and the village of Tanana. LPictured from left oto right: are, John Dart, Espen Jervsjö, and Frank Gurtler (Manley), and Charlie Wright (Tanana).

“Because we’ve lived here for a while, we have friends and acquaintances—and acquaintances of acquaintances—in a variety of communities. We were very fortunate that we could pretty much come into a community and establish a rapport with them,” Kielland said.

Ice Interviews

The team worked with communities in Fairbanks, Manley and the village of Tanana to gather their observations on the distribution and abundance of dangerous ice phenomena and how they impact  subsistence activities and travel throughout the winter. With help from Karen Brewster, a research associate for the Oral History Program at UAF, the team has hosted several workshops and interviews in the field with river travelers, the results of which are now being posted online.

Research associate Karen Brewster films interviews with Sam Demientieff (left) and Wally Carlo (right) on the Tanana River, March 2011.

“We  do semi-direct interview [s], take a lot of photographs and videotap[e]ing of areas and interviews,” Kielland said.  Interviews and photos from the dangerous ice project are made publicly available through the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Project Jukebox.

The combination of physical data and recorded oral histories has started to crack some of the mysteries of dangerous ice, shedding new light on the phenomena and how rural Alaskans deal with it.

Cracking the Ice

Some of the initial findings are a bit of a surprise to Kielland and his colleagues. Initially, he hypothesized that dangerous ice occurrences were tied to shallower (< 1 m) portions of the river more susceptible to melting from below due to ground water upwelling. However, that’s not always the case. The team has observed cases of dangerous ice in deeper waters (> 3 m).

Kielland has also documented very localized instances of dangerous ice where, “it’s almost like somebody sat down at the bottom [of the river or lake] with a laser and shot a hole in the ice. Hydrologists on the project are still working to understand the physics behind such localized events.

“We’re learning about the phenomena, about how wide- spread it is, and we’re learning about how people deal with it—though mostly they just want to stay far away from it,” Kielland said. “We don’t know much about how it has changed through time yet, but we hope our conversations with local residents can shed further light on that.”

Although winters in Alaska are getting warmer on the whole, dangerous ice phenomena aren’t necessarily a direct consequence of climate change.

“Winters in Alaska are getting warmer and climate predictions call for more snow. Both of those factors will probably exacerbate the situation, if anything, but we don’t consider this a direct consequence of warming. As I mentioned, we see the phenomenon even when it’s very cold out,” he said.

Lessons Learned

With the second year of the dangerous ice project now coming to a close, Kielland and Schneider hope to extend it for one more year to continue unraveling the mysteries behind dangerous ice.

The lessons learned from this project will not only tell us where dangerous ice is located and it’s potential causes, they will also help rural Alaskans avoid a wintertime problem that claims lives every year.

“We hope that at the end of the day, there will be an improved understanding from both our and their [rural Alaskans’] point of view about the nature of the phenomenon and how it’s distributed along the length of the Tanana that many of them travel,” Kielland said. For more information about the Dangerous Ice project (still under construction), visit: http://jukebox.uaf.edu/dangerice/start.htm. –Alicia Clarke

Comments (1) Dec 05 2011

A Polaris Ranger outfitted with tracks helps stretch fiber optics cable across the tundra near Toolik Station. All photos: Rorik Peterson

Many rural Alaskan towns remain without reliable communications infrastructure, particularly when it comes to the Internet. Rorik Peterson, a mechanical  engineer  from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, hopes to change that by stringing fiber optics cable across the Alaskan tundra.

Peterson, whose research includes modeling the seasonal freezing and thawing of soils, began a NSF-funded study during the 2011 spring that focuses on the durability of fiber optics cable in the harsh arctic climate. In April he and colleagues traveled to Toolik Station to set up their two-year experiment.

Routing cable from Toolik.

“It was a bit of a headache setting up our study at Toolik because of the many science groups that use the facility and study the ecosystems around the facility. But we worked together to find a time when we would not impact other science projects.  Seven station staff and I spent an entire day spooling out cable across several environments to see how the cable will fare over a couple of years. Not only is weather a consideration, animals are as well,” explains Peterson.

Fiber optics cables are currently operational between Anchorage and Fairbanks and along the Dalton Highway (the “Haul Road”) between Fairbanks and Prudhoe Bay, but burying cables is impractical given the remote setting of many Alaskan villages.

“We set our cable on top of the snow and tundra using a Polaris Ranger retrofitted with tracks. We had a 5km spool of cable trailered on the station pad that unspooled as we drove. We wanted to make a loop for easier testing, but it was challenging to do given that the cable, although somewhat flexible, is still pretty rigid and we didn’t want any kinks. We used a 1km section and made certain to drape cable across bedrock, a wet and swampy stream environment, and a bushy section of tundra.  In snowy sections, the cable will sink into the snow a bit as the days warm and the black cable melts into the snow and soil,” Peterson says. “The next step is a lot of sit and wait.”

FIber optics cable must be tough to serve Alaska's bush villages. Peterson spooled fiber optics cable across a number of harsh environments.

Peterson will revisit the site periodically to see whether animals disturb the cable. A real-time camera will take snapshots of the weather that Peterson will use in his assessment of how cold temperatures (often more than -40C) might affect the cable’s physical properties as well as data transmission.

“If the cables stand the test of time, a lot of Alaska’s interior may someday see significant improvement in their Internet communication. Communications companies will be able to easily characterize line performance and send teams out via helicopter for repairs when needed,” explains Peterson. “Now, even places like Barrow rely on satellites for communications. Most scientists that have worked out of there will tell you that it’s easier to make a DVD of their data and send it to colleagues via air rather than to try to upload or download data in real time. Fiber optics technology would change that.”—Marcy Davis

Comments (0) Nov 28 2011

2011 PolarTREC teacher, Susy Ellison, samples spruce trees for a dendrochronology study in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. All photos: Susy Ellison

Susy Ellison is the high school science teacher we all wish we’d had. With projects like designing and building an energy-efficient straw-bale classroom, installing solar panels on the school’s roof, and building a greenhouse (and growing things in it), Ellison is infusing her students with a strong sense of what she calls environmental literacy. Now in her 15^th year at Yampah Mountain High School in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, Ellison spent the summer with two teams of Alaskan researchers as a PolarTREC teacher, so this year’s class will, no doubt, be in for some fun and interesting science activities.

Ellison’s love for Alaska goes back to graduate school when she spent time in Prudhoe Bay studying how arctic foxes interact with nesting shorebirds and small mammals. Her field experience served her well this year as she traveled to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for a six-day NSF-funded tree-ring study with Kevin Anchukaitis and Angie Allen (Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory),  and to the Raven Bluff Site for two weeks with Jeff Rasic (UAF/NPS), William Hedman (BLM), and Ian Buvit (Central Washington University) for a NSF-supported study on early human settlement in arctic Alaska.

For the tree-ring study, field team members spent their time extracting straw-sized cores from standing white spruce trees in five sites spread over a few miles; Anchukaitis will compare annual growth rings from these cores with samples taken from fallen trees. By analyzing the thickness of annual rings, they will reconstruct North Slope climate and ultimately determine controls on the extent of arctic forest growth.

Traveling light - Ellison and Allen congratulate themselves on hauling all their gear in one trip.

“The tree-ring study was really interesting. Many scientists think that with climate warming and more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, trees might just grow and grow and grow, but new research says this may not be true. You can keep feeding someone, but it’s not going to make them taller,” explains Ellison. “I was impressed with how pretty simple science can provide pretty big answers. There were only three of us and we were just out there. We travelled light and fast. It was fun!”

Following a 10-day break exploring the Kenai Peninsula, Ellison joined Jeff Rasic’s team for a rainy and cool two week archaeological excavation near Kivalina.  Despite the soggy weather, the group made the best of things and worked hard to maximize their field time. In addition to searching for artifacts in one-meter square pits started during the 2010 field season, Ellison participated in a soil survey and in reconnaissance flights wherein the group looked for new archaeological sites.

“We usually hear that the first people to North America came from Asia via the Bering Land Bridge and then headed south. The Raven site is about the same age, about 12,000 years old, as the Clovis culture sites farther south. At Raven we looked, in particular, for these fluted spear points so that they can be dated and compared to similar Clovis-age points. The idea is that people may have moved back and forth between Alaska and southern North America rather than unidirectionally,” says Ellison.

“The similarity in these projects is that we were looking at old stuff, attempting to get information that can be applied to the present and, perhaps, predict future changes in the Arctic,” Ellison says. “The scientists were so passionate about their studies and the field season in Alaska is so short – they had to get it done. Everyone worked really hard to complete the work required in the short time period.”

Ellison tries to stay dry while recording soil profile data.

Now that a new school year is underway, Ellison is thinking about ways to share her PolarTREC experiences with Yampah. So far, she’s considering having students look at tree rings to determine Colorado’s long-term fire history. She would also like to take a group backpacking in Utah to see some archaeological sites close to home while considering what clues they might leave behind for future archaeologists to find.

Ellison’s school is run by the Mountain Board of Cooperative Educational Services, and serves students from four public school districts.  The school serves as an alternative to students who have been unsuccessful in other area high schools for one reason or another.

“Teaching science at Yampah is very challenging,” Ellison says. “Our classes are ungraded, which means that in one class I have students from all grades with all levels of science proficiency. I teach life, physical, and earth science so I have a lot of information to distill. Then, I put my own spin on it. I like to have an environmental focus with very hands-on projects. My experiences with PolarTREC have given me so many new ideas for how to communicate climate change issues and science research  to all my students, regardless of their science background.”—Marcy Davis

PolarTREC (Polar Teachers and Researchers Exploring and Collaborating) is funded by the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs and managed by the Arctic Research Consortium of the United States, or ARCUS. The program aims to give teachers professional development experiences conducting research in the polar regions with career scientists to boost the teachers’ content knowledge and to give them hands-on experience in scientific inquiry. ARCUS is accepting applications through the end of September from teachers and researchers interested in participating in the PolarTREC program during the 2012-2013 research season. Visit the ARCUS PolarTREC website for more information: http://www.polartrec.com/

Comments (0) Sep 23 2011

PolarTREC teacher spent his summer “under this mass of moving ice”

PolarTREC teacher Michael Lampert at the Engabreen Glacier. All photos: Michael Lampert

Buried two hundred meters below Engabreen Glacier, one of a handful of outlet glaciers that drain northern Norway’s Svartisen ice cap, is the Svartisen Subglacial Laboratory, one of the world’s most unique settings for glaciological research.  Just north of the Arctic Circle, the facility came online in conjunction with a new hydro-electric power plant in 1993. An elaborate network of more than 100 km of subglacial tunnels funnels glacial meltwater through the mountain to turbines at the Glumsfjord Kraftverk power station near the glacier base—and allows researchers direct access to the underside of the glacier.

Living quarters and a science lab are housed within barracks-like structures in a tunnel below the surface near the glacier’s origin. The only light is the eerie yellow glow emitted from sodium vapor lamps and headlamps affixed to scientists’ hardhats.

The Svartisen Subglacial Laboratory houses underground labs and living space.

Michael Lampert, a 2011 PolarTREC teacher* from West Salem High School in Salem, Oregon, who joined PI Neal Iverson (Iowa State University) and team on this year’s field expedition, describes his first impression of the lab:

“A helicopter took us up to the top of [the] glacier where we were to enter the tunnel to the Laboratory. I kept looking for a grand entrance, but when we arrived it was just a post with a doorway. We shoveled out a bunch of snow so we could get the door open then walked about 100m through a corrugated pipe that opened into a large room,” Lampert explains.  “It was a little like being in a sewer – dark, drippy, cold, humid air that is very still. You can always hear water rushing through the tunnels. It’s a very odd feeling. There was this unbelievably strange emptiness. I wasn’t expecting it.”

Svartisen's foyer...

Lampert joined Iverson on the latter’s NSF-funded project to understand how, and how fast, Engebreen Glacier moves. During underground stays of up to three weeks at the subglacial lab, the group works at the glacier-bedrock interface, measuring water pressure and microseismicity, tiny earthquakes associated with glacier movement. Data obtained at Svartisen provide fundamental information about variability in glacier movement, information Iverson hopes will translate to long-term predictions about the ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica, and their potential contributions to sea-level change.

Lampert mucks out the tunnel.

“The idea here, the overall goal, is to stimulate a rapid glacier movement event by pumping water under the glacier for an hour while measuring the resulting microseismicity,” explains Iverson. “We measure water pressure in pump tests and embed accelerometers in the glacier to monitor ice acceleration. We then correlate these motion data to seismicity measured in the tunnel and on the glacier surface. We manipulate the system to try to understand it better. We are trying to calibrate motion in a very large-scale laboratory so we can apply results to other glaciers.”

Melting last year's ice.

Donning rubber boots and suits to protect them from mud and water, researchers worked to free instruments left in the glacier ice last summer for maintenance and repairs. To get at the equipment, the team first had to melt free a steel door separating the tunnel from the glacier. Using relatively hot water (sixty degrees) from a fire hose directed at the door for an hour, Lampert , who has a background in physics, got his first up-close glimpse of the Engabreen’s underbelly. In a May 2 PolarTREC journal entry he wrote:

“The very bottom of the glacier is a mix of sediment and debris but there is a sudden line of clear glacier ice, often you see lines like this on icebergs that have calved into the ocean. The blue ice has a magical appearance when illuminated with a flood light.”

The glacier's base is mixture of ice and sediment.

Next, the team melted horizontal and vertical shafts through the ice to expose boreholes in the rock through which instrumentation, cables, and wiring pass from instruments embedded in the glacier to lab computers. During the year, the holes become clogged with ice that must be removed periodically. It’s a constant fight against moving ice, which can close off passageways at rates of 1-2 meters a day.

“Ice [that is] under 200 meters of pressure oozes like toothpaste. [It’s] not brittle like the ice in your freezer,” explains Lampert. “Once the sensors are in the glacier and we stop melting, the ice moves back in. The glacier is moving so the ice will ooze around you in the course of a day. You can see a difference within an hour. It’s kind of creepy. Sometimes I would sit in a space in the ice and close my eyes. I would think about just exactly where I was – under this mass of moving ice and that really put me in touch with Earth’s geology. That was one of the coolest things ever!”

Enjoying the view from outside the lab entrance.

Instrumentation includes a friction plate, a granite-topped metal disc about a foot in diameter and loaded with sensors that measure the force of the glacier as it slides over bedrock. The plate, the only one of its kind, also contains a water pressure sensor and an acoustic sensor that ‘listens’ to the glacier’s sounds as it moves past. Other sensors include accelerometers in palm-sized capsules that monitor ice motion.

“Some accelerometers have cable tethers that are fed through boreholes in the underlying rock to lab computers.  Some transmit wirelessly through the tunnel. Both types have advantages and disadvantages. There is lots of screwing around with electrical stuff in conditions a degree above freezing and 100% humidity,” Iverson says.

Accelerometer maintenance is serious business.

Once instrumentation is tested and reinstalled, the shafts are left alone so that the ice “heals.” Then water is pumped through the tunnel at the base of the glacier and the team waits for data.

“We know for certain that moving ice produces seismicity and the character of our data seem to indicate motion of ice as opposed water, “ explains Iverson. “We are still working out what our data mean. The signals look like we are recording the basal motion of the glacier as it slides over rock, but we are working through the details as the data can be very noisy.”

Other sampling efforts include ice coring, sediment and geologic analyses.

Miriam Jackson takes an ice sample.

As for Lampert, he’ll bring lots of stories back to his community and classroom this fall.

“The whole thing was out of the world – so totally surrealistic! These scientists are getting at the real fundamentals of science. I want my students to really understand that applying science in the field is the best part. Then there’s the living in a tunnel – there’s a psychological effect with it that I didn’t expect. When we finally walked out from this place of 24 hours of darkness into the 24-hour day of the polar summer, it was wild…quite a metaphor to walk out of total darkness into light, from nothingness to life.”—Marcy Davis

PolarTREC (Polar Teachers and Researchers Exploring and Collaborating) is funded by the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs and managed by the Arctic Research Consortium of the United States, or ARCUS. The program aims to give teachers professional development experiences conducting research in the polar regions with career scientists to boost the teachers’ content knowledge and to give them hands-on experience in scientific inquiry. ARCUS is accepting applications through the end of September from teachers and researchers interested in participating in the PolarTREC program during the 2012-2013 research season. Visit the ARCUS PolarTREC website for more information: http://www.polartrec.com/

Comments (1) Sep 16 2011

Katey Walter Anthony (UAF) smiles after a good day of field work. Photo: Valera Fedoseev

In terms of carbon footprint, though one hears a lot about carbon dioxide, it’s methane that wears the size 12 clodhopper. Methane is more effective at trapping heat in earth’s atmosphere than carbon dioxide and also contributes to the degradation of the ozone layer. When permafrost thaws, release of methane into the atmosphere from anaerobic decomposition contributes to climate warming, which subsequently causes more permafrost thaw – thus acting as an important feedback loop in global climate. Katey Walter Anthony (University of Alaska, Fairbanks) and an international team of colleagues are studying permafrost and thermokarst lakes to better understand how thawing permafrost and the subsequent release of methane is contributing to climate warming. Since 2008 Anthony and colleagues have worked on the interdisciplinary study in Cherskii and Yakutsk, Russia, all over Alaska, in western Canada, Greenland and Sweden describing the distribution of permafrost and the process of landscape evolution and gas escape as permafrost thaws.

“We have a pan-Arctic focus with the goal of understanding carbon release from permafrost. Not only are we describing the extent of thermokarst in Siberia, Alaska, western Canada and other regions of the Arctic, we’re looking at how thermokarst lakes develop and release methane in particular,” says Anthony.

Permafrost, soil at or below the freezing point of water for at least two years, is common at high latitudes. As the climate warms, however, permafrost thaws and forms an irregular landscape called thermokarst (the pitted nature of the surface resembles those developed in karst areas of limestone). In surface depressions, lakes form where massive ground ice melted. Permafrost contains vast reserves of carbon stored within a frozen framework that is released when permafrost thaws.

Anthony and colleagues are interested in yedoma, a specific type of permafrost that is particularly high in carbon and supersaturated with ice, about 50-90% by volume. Formed in unglaciated continental areas during the last ice age, yedoma is most prevalent in northeastern Siberia where it may be tens of meters thick. Thawing yedoma yields a significant source of atmospheric methane.

“Thermokarst lakes formed from the thawing of yedoma are very efficient at releasing carbon, in the form of methane, into the atmosphere,” Anthony explains. “As the ice melts, water and 46,000 year-old methane, CH₄, are released. We are trying to quantify how much carbon is released as well as the variability in different regions.”

When headed to the field, Anthony and her co-investigator, Guido Grosse, first identify likely areas of permafrost exposures using satellite imagery. Ideal locations are usually along rivers where cut banks have excavated steep exposures that may be up to 50 m tall.

Researchers survey permafrost-laden soils at the Arctic Coast north of Cherskii, Northeast Siberia. Soils rich in ground ice also have high organic matter content. When this permafrost thaws, formerly frozen carbon becomes available which produce carbon dioxide and methane. Photo: G. Grosse

“These are the best places to work because we can see 60,000 years of history all at once. You can see the whole layered cake of ice and frozen soil in cross section! We can tease out a lot of information about past permafrost and climate,” Anthony says. “We have to be very careful when we sample to find a fresh cut that has not thawed in the recent past. The first part is just moving dirt with shovels and scrapers so we have to be very careful. We have to work quickly because the permafrost can thaw very quickly. We sample and describe different units with a focus on the amount of ice and carbon in representative layers. We can scale up. Studying broad exposures has some big advantages over permafrost coring, where our interpretation of an area is otherwise limited to what we find in 4cm diameter cores.”

Anthony does much of her methane field work during winter. And, while she says it’s no fun to wake up in -30 degree temperatures at field camps, winter work is easier in some ways. Lake ice provides an opportunity to map methane bubbles on thermokarst lakes. Coring permafrost requires the use of a permafrost drill, a gas-powered auger with a core barrel and drill bit at the end. Anthony says permafrost coring is often most easily accomplished in winter conditions when the permafrost is frozen solid. Samples can be quickly acquired from a snowmobile and there’s less chance of the core casing freezing up during the coring since it’s already cold.

Anthony and then graduate adviser, Terry Chapin (UAF), engage in a tug of war to separate a tube containing lake sediments from the core head. Photo: M. Chapin

Anthony’s team also prefers coring thermokarst lake sediments in the winter because they can use lake ice as a stable platform for field work. Sediments from the bottom of a lake can tell Anthony how old the lake is–some lakes developed at the end of the last ice age nearly 12,000 years ago, while others developed much later and have been expanding since.

Sometimes lake coring in summer is necessary. “Summer lake coring requires a huge amount of work. It’s very dirty. There are lots of mosquitoes. I have spent hours hammering a core barrel into the lake bed from a raft just to have nothing come up. It’s much easier in the winter when we can do it from the ice covering the lake. Then it requires much less gear and it’s stable,” says Anthony.

Methane bubbles rising from the lake bottom are trapped by winter ice. Photo: K. Walter Anthony

Anthony also maps lake methane bubbles during winter. Methane formed by microbes from thawing permafrost is released from lake bottoms in the form of bubbles all year long. In summer, bubbles rise to the top of the lake and burst, releasing almost pure methane into the atmosphere, but in the winter, lake ice forms a lid that traps methane bubbles.

“We use shovels to remove any fresh snow from the lake ice surface. What we find is really neat–the ice looks black and had beautiful white bubbles stacked on top of each other in place to place–much like the stars scattered across the night sky,” Anthony explains. “We map the distribution of the bubbles which get trapped, forming tall columns of methane. We can tell where the gas is coming from, how it clusters. We get a good spatial data set.”

Anthony and Dragos Vas (UAF) check the volume of gas collected in under-ice bubble traps on a thermokarst lake in Fairbanks. Photo: M. Grimes

Back in the lab Anthony sub-samples permafrost and lake cores for radiocarbon dates, a method that helps her and colleagues understand the history of permafrost formation across northern Siberia and Alaska.

In 2011, Anthony’s team, along with students and post doctoral candidates from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, returned to Seward Peninsula and interior Alaska field sites to recover time-lapse cameras, temperature data loggers, and bubble traps, which record the rate of gas release. The team also worked in Cherskii, Russia. During that expedition, Anthony worked with three students and a postdoc who have sub-projects studying permafrost and peat along the Kolyma River.—Marcy Davis

Katey Walter Anthony’s research is funded, in part, by NSF, NASA, and the Department of Energy

Comments (0) Sep 08 2011

Laura Lukes, teacher and arctic adventurer! Photo: Laura Lukes

For science and geology teacher Laura Lukes, witnessing the moment a student’s face lights up when a new discovery is made or a confounding problem is finally solved is one of the most rewarding moments of teaching. And this summer Lukes experienced those moments time and time again with an international group of two-dozen students at the Kangerlussuaq Field School in
Greenland.

2011 marked the summer field school program’s inaugural semester. For Lukes, it was the culmination of a year of hard work that began as an Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow at the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Office of Polar Programs. While a fellow at NSF, she took the U.S. lead role on the Joint Science Education Project (JSEP). Her mission: to help organize a field school to bring together students and scientists from the U.S., Greenland and Denmark for hands-on scientific and cultural experiences.

“I really love the ‘aha moments’ where somebody finally understands something or learns something and it completely changes the way they feel,” Lukes said. “To me those are the best moments and with programs like JSEP, you have those moments constantly.”

The JSEP group puts their map-reading skills to the test. Photo by Hans Christian Sivertsen

Teaching Hands-on Science from Arizona to the Arctic

Before joining NSF, Lukes taught science and geology at a community college and high school in Scottsdale, Arizona where she first started coming up with ideas to take science from the textbook to the field. One of those initial ideas was a museum of minerals featuring displays tied to materials the high school students were studying in the classroom.

Lukes noticed there were several stock science samples from previous teachers collecting dust in storage. Since builders had just finished a new addition to the high school, Lukes had a bit of an “aha moment” herself. She and some students quickly got to work planning and building the mineral museum exhibits together.

“Although I’m no longer with the school, the long-term idea was for the students to help create rotating displays for the museum.  It would be like a class project for them,” Lukes explained.

A Door to Teaching in the Arctic

After five years as a teacher in Scottsdale, Lukes applied for, and was awarded, the Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellowship that started her on a path to the Arctic. The opportunity to develop the fledgling Greenland field school piqued her interest because she recognized the value of field research experience in a young person’s life and thought the JSEP field school could be a huge success.

“From talking with scientists over the years, I’ve informally figured out that a lot of them have had some sort of field or research experience themselves early on and that’s what got them interested in it [science/research],” Lukes said.

Over the course of the next year, Lukes teamed with other teachers and scientists to create a unique educational opportunity for high school students around the county and the world. Not only would her experiences in Greenland change the lives of the field school students, but it would open her eyes to a whole new world of interests.

On Their Way

A 2010 planning trip to Greenland was Lukes’ first time in the Arctic. Just figuring out what to pack was an eye-opening experience. By the time late June 2011 rolled around, Lukes and 24 high school students were boarding planes for the tiny settlement of Kangerlussuaq in western Greenland.

Laura Lukes (far right) and some of the field school students are all smiles. Photo: Laura Lukes

Not Your Ordinary School Days

Lukes and her colleagues organized the field school so that the students would experience every step in the scientific process—from brain-storming project ideas and organizing data collection outings to analyzing data and presenting their findings. The students worked in research teams to get the feel for what it’s like to collaborate with people from different countries, backgrounds and interests.

“The students came up with the idea for their own projects. The teacher really served as a guide for their own exploration, meaning I helped them stay focused and instructed them on how to do research properly. But the students really drove the questions and how they were going to collect data to answer them,” Lukes said.

Along the journey several scientists already in the area collecting data stopped by to teach the next generation of scientists a thing or two.  Visiting scientists from various universities and agencies, including the Danish Meteorological Institute and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, presented their research and invited the field school participants out for data collection field trips or back to their field research site for a tour.

Research scientist Julia Bradley-Cook (a Fellow in an NSF-funded interdisciplinary, graduate research program in polar studies called IGERT) gives the JSEP students a lesson on how to measure carbon dioxide in soil. Photo: Taylor Estabrooks

Two unexpected visitors were a particular thrill for the Danish and Greenlandic students. A change in the day’s flight schedule allowed the Danish minister of science and Greenland’s minister of education to pay a visit to the field school. “They happened to be stuck in Kangerlussuaq for a while so they stopped by to hear the students’ presentations! So the students really got a quality experience,” Lukes said.

Surprise! Denmark's Minister of Science (left) stops by to listen to student presentations. Photo: Laura Lukes

Teaching (and Learning) More Than Science

The once-in-a-lifetime chance to bring students from three very different cultures together was a big part of the field school experience. Lukes and the students were in a camp-like setting for roughly four weeks.

“Personally for me, the most meaningful moments were talking with the Greenlandic students and having them start conversations about their culture and watching them get excited about talking about their culture,” Lukes said. She recalled them being very shy at first, but as time wore on they came out of their shells.

Now, Lukes still keeps in touch with many of her students. Two of the students from the U.S. recently started their first year of college and decided to choose engineering majors as a result of their experiences at the field school. Still other students are presenting their findings at professional conferences—the Geological Society of America and the American Geophysical Union—this fall and winter.

And what’s next for Lukes? The sky’s the limit. She is currently working on her doctorate at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. In between classes she still finds time to teach an online course at a community college in Arizona. She plans to remain involved and continue to grow the JSEP field school program now and in the future.

“Regardless of where I end up, I feel really passionate about student research experiences in the field and I really believe in developing this program and showing the evidence part of why these types of programs are so important.”

Here’s to great teachers!

To learn more about the Kangerlussuaq Field School and check out Lukes’ daily blog, visit: http://www.polartrec.com/expeditions/greenland-education-tour-2011. –Alicia Clarke

Comments (0) Sep 06 2011