Summit Station Images Featured on Atmospheric Optics

Greenland Glory. Photo: Ed Stockard

The above photo, and the one just below, have been featured recently as the Optics Photo of the Day on the Atmospheric Optics website (http://www.atoptics.co.uk/). Ed Stockard shot both images at Summit Station on Greenland’s ice sheet, where he is working this fall.

The Atmospheric Optics website is devoted to explaining and exploring the visual results of light playing on particles in the air–ash, dust, and in Ed’s case, ice. The rainbow-colored rings encircling the building form a “glory,” explains website curator Les Crowley, the result of “sunlight diffracted almost directly back along its path by very small fog droplets.” Click the picture for a better view. Glory indeed.

Visit the Atmospheric Optics website to learn more about optical effects in the atmosphere, and to find out when, how, and where you might be able to see some in person.

A short description of the science behind the optical effect accompanies each image. You may also visit Ed Stockard’s flickr page, which he is updating with more lovely images from Summit (http://www.flickr.com/photos/coastaleddy/ ).–Kip Rithner

Greenland Halos. Photo: Ed Stockard

Comments (0) Sep 12 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

2011 PolarTREC orientation participants pose for a group photo after dinner. Photo courtesy of Mike League

During the last week in February, thirteen educators from across the United States convened in Fairbanks, Alaska, to participate in the 2011 PolarTREC Orientation and ShareFair. The annual orientation is the kick off for this rigorous and rewarding National Science Foundation-funded professional development opportunity. Now in its fifth year, PolarTREC improves teacher content knowledge and instructional practices through intensive two-to-eight-week research experiences in the polar regions. While working closely with polar scientists across many scientific disciplines, PolarTREC teachers share information about polar science and the polar regions with their students and communities.

National Science Foundation Einstein Fellow, Laura Lukes tries a reindeer antler on for size at the UAF Reindeer Research Station. Photo courtesy of Janet Warburton

Orientation events included presentations from ARCUS staff who described the PolarTREC program, requirements, and technology. Three PolarTREC alumni and one past PolarTREC researcher attended the orientation to share their experiences and words of wisdom with newly selected teachers.

University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist, Katey Walter Anthony, clears snow from a small pond to try to find methane bubbles trapped in the ice. Photo courtesy of Zeb Polly

A large part of orientation is preparing teachers for the logistical situations unique to the polar regions. Robbie Score from CPS and Roy Stehle from SRI both attended to ensure teachers had a good understanding of typical procedures and the use of satellite phones. Several additional PolarTREC alumni, researchers, and other experts joined the orientation in-person and virtually to present on their areas of expertise.

ARCUS Website Developer Ronnie Owens helps a small group of teachers learn how to post journal entries to the PolarTREC website. Photo courtesy of Zeb Polly

During the orientation’s communication technology training, teachers learned to post online journals, complete with photos and video, from their field camps and stations. Participants also listened to presentations and discussed ideas for sharing the PolarTREC experience with their classrooms, schools, and communities. Between intensive training and hands-on work sessions the whole group also got outside, explored Fairbanks, and learned a little about the Arctic.

Field trips included a visit to the University of Alaska’s (UAF) Museum of the North, the UAF Reindeer Research Program, the World Ice Art Championships, and a visit to a nearby thermokarst pond where Katey Anthony Walter discussed the role of methane in a warming arctic. Teachers also visited the CPS warehouse where Polar Field Service’s Matt Irinaga performed his popular “dressing for work in the Arctic” fashion show.

Matt Irinaga actively describes methods for dressing to work in the Arctic. Photo courtesy of Mike League

Despite the long days, many teachers expressed that the PolarTREC orientation and ShareFair was one of the best professional development workshops they had experienced. At the end of the week they felt well-prepared and enthusiastic about sharing their upcoming experiences.

PolarTREC teachers take photos and record videos as they feed lichen to the reindeer at the UAF Reindeer Research Station. Photo courtesy of Janet Warburton

PolarTREC teachers venturing into the Arctic this year include John Wood, who worked with Susan Natali (University of Florida) studying carbon balance in Healy, Alaska; and Mike Lampert, who is now based at the Svartisen Subglacial Laboratory in Norway with researchers from Iowa State Unversity. Paula Dell is spending April to early June in the Antarctic studying ice fish with Kristin O’Brien from the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

In coming events, Jim Pottinger will soon return to Greenland to work with Koni Steffen (University of Colorado) at Swiss Camp, while Jim Miller will visit Barrow, Alaska in June to study microbial activity in thawing permafrost  with David Lipson of San Diego State University.

Teacher expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic will be ongoing throughout the year.

Comments (0) May 03 2011

A Chukotkan family sitting down to enjoy a meat sampler (aged walrus, aged seal, whale skin fat) with fermented seal oil (in a cup to the left of the tray) being used as dipping sauce. Photo: Sveta Yamin-Pasternak

While processing backyard chickens last summer, Sveta Yamin-Pasternak thought how nice it would be to bury those fresh carcasses in the ground and let microorganisms preserve her food the easy way. When the time was right, she could dig up the fermented fowl and enjoy them.

Though she instead decided to use a freezer for her chickens, Yamin-Pasternak is a student of the “tastefully rotten” foods of people who live in far-east Russia. She admires the simpler, if smellier, way of doing things.

Originally from Belarus, Yamin-Pasternak now lives in Alaska, but has traveled for the last decade to villages in Chukotka, the part of Russia that rubs noses with Alaska’s Seward Peninsula. There, the anthropologist studied a return to fermented food preparation. She recently gave a talk at the University of Alaska Fairbanks detailing her “marvelous stinky path.”

For ages, native peoples of northern Russian and the Arctic have included some partially decomposed foods in their diet. One example from the west coast of Alaska is “stink flipper,” the paw of a bearded seal buried in the tundra and later retrieved and eaten when it has attained the proper level of rottenness, a measurement learned from experience.

Yamin-Pasternak described how these foods had waned in popularity in Russia’s far east during the height of the Soviet regime. Government-sponsored boarding schools in the villages featured menus similar to those in central Russia.

“There was lots of pasta, sweetened condensed milk and sausages (rather than marine mammals and reindeer),” Yamin-Pasternak said. During the peak of Soviet control, government officials made it illegal for hunters to go out on the ocean before first signing in with border guards on the coast—a law that still exists.

“(Government decision makers) didn’t regard Native foods as food,” Yamin-Pasternak said.

The change in diet that came with the powerful Soviet regime was hard for some people to stomach, Yamin-Pasternak said.

“Rice and porridge and bread didn’t satisfy their need to feel full,” she said. “They needed certain foods, like seal oil and whale skin fat (known in Alaska as maktak), to quench their hunger.”

People still ate foods like fermented walrus meat, but they partook on the sly. Things began to change when the carbohydrate-rich staples of the regime diet became hard to find during the breakup of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. Village stores that supplied the sweetened condensed milk lost their government subsidies. The shelves went empty, forcing villagers to rely more on subsistence foods. There began a “rotten renaissance,” Yamin-Pasternak said.

“The generation gaps created by the Soviet system started to break down. People were going back to their grandparents, asking how to prepare (the ‘tastefully rotten’ foods).”

When she visits the Chukotka villages today, Yamin-Pasternak knows when she’s around walrus flipper fermented in a bag made of bearded seal skin (“it does not do this talk justice not to smell it,”), and she knows which dipping bowl is full of seal oil and which contains the reindeer blood. She can partake in some of the fermented foods, but said she can’t get past her gag reflex with others, and has noticed the same reaction in some of the younger generations of the Chukotka Yupik and Chukchi, raised with more Russified tastes. She thinks that, over time, she could adapt to even the most fragrant menu items, because she has seen so many people in the villages grow to love the foods of their ancestors.

“It really illuminates the power of socialization,” she said. “Food practices are learned.”  —Ned Rozell

This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer at the institute.

Comments (0) Mar 09 2011

Part of the 2010 UW Clean Snowmobile Challenge Team. All photos from the University of Wisconsin Snowmobile Team website

We recently spoke with Jay Meldrum, Director of the Keweenaw Research Center at Michigan Technical University, about the annual Clean Snowmobile Challenge (CSC) in Houghton Michigan, and the conversation left us wanting to know more about what it’s like to participate in the engineering contest.

To find out more, we talked with Ethan Brodsky who participated in the Clean Snowmobile Challenge while a graduate at the University of Wisconsin in Madison during the early 2000s. Now a staff scientist in radiology and medical imaging at his alma mater, Brodsky became the “unofficial advisor” (Glenn Bower is the official advisor)  to the school’s CSC team in 2008. He offers a unique perspective on the past, present, and future of the Society of Automotive Engineers Clean Snowmobile Challenge competition.

Ethan Brodsky and the University of Wisconsin zero emissions snowmobile, the Silent BuckEV, at Summit Station.

“Participating in these student vehicle competitions was one of the highlights of my college career,” relates Brodsky. “Each event culminates in a week-long competition that is exhilarating like nothing else I’ve experienced. It’s a sleep-deprived rush that can only end in two ways: either you win and it was all worth it, or somebody else does, and those weeks of late nights in the garage were all wasted.”

Brodsky said most students participate as an extracurricular activity out of personal interest, although some receive independent study credit. Brodsky became the pseudo-advisor to UW’s Clean Snowmobile Challenge team in graduate school. The team consists of about 15 students who spend the year tweaking snowmobile engines to reduce emissions without sacrificing performance in preparation for the competition.

“Most students do it a couple of years for fun or as a resume builder or to help get into grad school,” explains Brodsky. “But some people really get into the leadership roles and stick around for their entire college career.”

Today Brodsky is one of UW’s CSC team advisors who has helped lead the team to championships for gas-powered snowmobiles in 2009 and 2010. The zero-emissions snowmobile won the 2008, 2009, and 2010 competitions.

The Silent BuckEV at competition in the Zero Emissions category of the Clean Snowmobile Challenge.

“The UW College of Engineering has had a tradition of excellence across our automotive student design projects dating back over a decade. We’ve won five hybrid vehicle competitions, taken home seven first-place trophies at the CSC, and won a number of other national SAE events.  A lot of the credit goes to Dr. Glenn Bower, the senior student vehicle projects advisor—his dedication to the projects and the students is immeasurable. He expects a lot from everyone and drives the students to do their best.

In 2008 Brodsky was invited to bring the winning zero emissions snowmobile to Summit Station, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded research station on Greenland’s ice sheet summit, where it would be rotated into the station’s snowmobile fleet (The NSF has supported the zero-emissions competition for years, most recently through this NSF grant.  It was a whirlwind trip—three days in which he tested the snowmobile in the harsh Greenland environment. At Summit, Brodsky did a lot of test-driving. He also taught Summit staffers to run, handle, and maintain the retrofitted machine. In all, the staff learned how to take the snowmobile apart and put it back together, how to charge the 350 volt batteries and keep them running, and how to download data (how many miles driven) from the attached data logger. In 2009, UW again loaned its winning snowmobile to Summit Station, where it was used all summer.

“Greenland was the most other-worldly place I’ve ever been,” says Brodsky. “Just the white landscape as far as I could see against the blue sky.  It was a very lonely-feeling place, far from everything, very alien. It was an awesome trip!”

Looking ahead, Brodsky says he would like to see opportunity for riskier design in future Clean Snowmobile Challenges. When the competition began in 2000, students’ snowmobiles were better than anything sold in the market. In the interim, snowmobile manufacturers have adopted myriad changes and cleaned up their machines. Meanwhile, the rules of competition have changed very little in the last 10 years. Teams are allowed only to alter the engine but Brodsky says this is somewhat limiting now in terms of innovation as many technologies developed in the last decade may not yet be applied to competition designs.

The UW team prepares battery packs.

So, Brodsky says in the meantime, his zero-emissions team will focus on trying to build a more robust snowmobile that’s more useful in Greenland and, hopefully, Antarctica. The next step, Brodsky says, is to develop a better battery management system with batteries that can run all the way down and that can better handle Greenland’s cold temperatures.  He would also like to develop battery packs that can last five years. In any case, he’s still having fun.

“It’s funny—because of these projects, my friends seem to get younger and younger. Or, I guess I’m just getting old. We still stay up all night working together on snowmobile designs. It was the most exciting part of my college experience and of my life in general.”—Marcy Davis

For more, visit the Clean Snowmobile Challenge website.

Comments (0) Mar 01 2011