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

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

PolarTREC teacher Jim Pottinger does the hokey-pokey at Summit Station. All photos: Jim Pottinger

“Sleeping in a tent in the Arctic was a new experience for me. Temperatures dipped below 0°F and the winds were consistently blowing against the tent.”– Jim Pottinger, 2010 PolarTREC teacher

Jim Pottinger enjoys cold weather, so living at Summit Station’s Tent City on the Greenland ice cap for a week was fine by him. Camping atop 3200 meters of ice was one of several new experiences for the Pennsylvania native who travelled to Greenland last summer as part of the PolarTREC Program. Pottinger’s team, which is led by PI Konrad Steffen (CIRES), travelled to Summit to maintain instrumentation for the NSF-funded BSRN – Compatible Irradiance Measurements and the Stable Boundary Layer

At Summit Station, Pottinger worked with Karl Schroff and Hansjoerg Frei (from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) and Nikko Bayou (UC Boulder).

After a long day of shoveling snow Nikko Bayou reaches the APTU at last.

Their first task was to locate and retrieve an Automated Temperature Profiling Unit (APTU), which started its mission recording high altitude weather data in 2007.

“After a four-mile bone-chilling [snowmobile] ride, we arrived at the site. It was a beautiful location in the middle of the Greenland ice sheet. The sky was blue, the terrain was white and there was nothing as far as the eye could see,” Pottinger wrote in his August 14 journal.

They located the unit by GPS. Only two feet of the ten-foot tall APTU tripod was sticking up out of the snow. It took six hours and digging down about twenty feet before they freed the tripod and data logger using snowmobiles and ropes.

Elevating the Automatic Weather Station - turns out it looks tougher than it is.

The team’s next task was to elevate Summit’s AWS, one of eighteen such stations in Greenland. First, the scientists attached cable extensions to accommodate the station’s new height. Next, they erected a tripod over the station, attached a rope to the top of the AWS, and lifted the station ten feet while inserting an extension tube to the base. Once the station was secure, they removed the tripod and later verified data transmission. The entire data transmission process only took one hour!

Next, they dug a 140-centimeter deep snow pit next to the AWS. Pottinger recorded the pit’s snow structure, making notes of density, snow crystal shape and size, layer thickness and volume  every ten centimeters. These measurements will help ground-truth the AWS and ensure that sensors were working properly over the two previous years.

Pottinger becomes an old hand at snow pit measurements.

Pottinger also assisted in elevating and calibrating BSRN instrumentation and learned about ongoing NOAA weather experiments.

Pottinger’s visit coincided with Summit’s transition between seasonal crews. This meant a busy couple of days while winter preparations were made. Following a great end of season dinner, Pottinger spent his last night in the Big House and flew out with a jubilant summer crew the next morning.

Summer crew kicks back at the end of the season party at Lake Fergueson.

Pottinger, who has a background in geology, coordinates the GATE (Gifted and Talented Education) program at Gateway High School in Monroeville, Pennsylvania. He acts as an academic advisor, making sure students are on an academic path consistent with their post-secondary goals, and as a science teacher, giving periodic guest lectures in science classes.

Pottinger hopes to return to Greenland’s Swiss Camp next May with Steffen. He will again be involved in systems maintenance and hopes to learn more about how the collected data is being used in various science projects. In the meantime, he’s keeping busy sharing his experience with students, teachers and community. Pottinger hopes he can begin to correct some of the misconceptions people have about climate change, the Arctic, and the people who live there.—Marcy Davis

Comments (0) Jan 20 2011

PolarTREC teacher Claude Larson enjoys Red Square in Moscow en route to her summer field site in Kamchatka. All photos: Claude Larson, courtesy PolarTREC 2010

I challenge you to think about what your amazing adventure would be. Even better, I challenge you to make a part of each day have just a little bit of adventure. It’s sure to make you look forward to something every day. And that would be amazing.—Claude Larson 

Claude Larson is no stranger to adventure. For one, she teaches 8^th grade Physical Science at the Jefferson Township Middle School in Oak Ridge, New Jersey. She’s a mixed media artist. She jumps out of airplanes (for fun!).  Now, she’s a globe-trotting, NSF-grant-funded, PolarTREC teacher.

PolarTREC (Teachers and Researchers Exploring and Collaborating) matches K-12 teachers with polar scientists for hands-on research in the Polar Regions. Teachers spend between 2-6 weeks in the field working alongside scientists while reporting on their experience with their students and community via online and satellite technologies.

PolarTREC paired Larson with Greg Korosec and Dustin Keeler (both at  SUNY Buffalo), PhD students involved with the International Circumpolar Collaborative Archaeological Project. For this multi-year, internationally collaborative project researchers study the archaeology and paleoenvironment at three locations including Northern Finland, northern Canada, and 2010’s destination, the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia.

Larson’s induction into Arctic science was a whirlwind. On April 16, she accepted the position. On May 5, she attended PolarTREC teacher training in Fairbanks where she learned how to use a satellite phone—this allowed her to update an online journal from her remote field location—and two months later, she was the first of the teachers to leave for the field. Before she left, Larson learned about the project in a pre-field logistics phone conference, watched videos on bear safety, tested gear and clothing, and brushed up on useful Russian phrases. She gave talks to each grade at her school, fit in a trip to Manhattan with her sister, and her daughter’s college freshman orientation.  On July 3, she left North America for the first time.

Hello, bat-phone? Claude practices with the sat phone before leaving for Russia.

“One of the previous years’ teachers told us at the training that our lives wouldn’t get crazy until about two months before we left. It was then that I realized I had exactly two months before I was to leave. She was right—it was a crazy time, but really fun!”

After spending two days exploring Moscow and meeting up with the research team, including several Russian scientists and students, the real adventure began. From Moscow, they flew to Petropovlosk-Kamchatsky, a bustling outpost on the southeastern coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula and their base for final errands before the long ride to their remote field location.

First, the team loads luggage and supplies on a bus for a dreadfully bouncy 81/2 hour ride on a gravel road. Next, the bus backs onto a small ferry for a short trip across a river and the bumpy ride continues to Ushki just as nightfall (and the mosquitoes) descends. Luggage offloaded, sleep. The next day, they load luggage onto another bus and meet up with a Vesdehod, a vintage Soviet transporter with tank-like wheels. On the Vesdehod, they ferry on a barge across a lake to Kultuk (this plan interrupted by a windstorm that forces the group to set up camp at an abandoned house) then travel overland to Stolbevaya.

Larson reports in her July 14 journal entry:

“The vehicle starts off with a loud clatter and settles into a bone-rattling roar. It whines as it takes on hills and accelerates on straight-aways – which are rare. The machine seems to eat tall grass, shrubs and even small trees. I decided to start the trip on the top of the vesdehod . . . With a death grip on the small railing that is atop the beast, I clung on through pitches and dives that had us leaving our seats on several occasions. Along with holding on to the rail and trying to stay in a somewhat seated position, you must also watch out for branches that hang over the road. The basic procedure is to drop forward as low as possible to let the branch pass over you… This was for the most part, pretty effective; however there were times when you just got beat.”

At last, after traveling eleven days, through sixteen time zones, five airports, two ferries, two busses, and a Vesdehod, the research team finally reached their destination on the Bering Sea coast. The next step was to set up a camp with access to fresh water and high enough to be safe from tsunamis (Kamchatka is the most volcanically active place in the world).  A cooking area, tent city, lab tent, and latrine came next.

For the next two weeks, Larson’s daily commute was an hour hike through the tundra looking for clusters of circular depressions that are the foundations of 3000 year-old houses. Once found, the team logged locations on a GPS, and took a sample soil core.  Larson had the honor of being the first to locate one of the pit houses.

When a little depression is a good thing. Larson stands in front of the shallow depression indicating her find.

Next, the team measured out a meter squared for a controlled excavation where they cleaned the soil in 10 cm increments by scooping it up and putting it through a screen, gathering artifacts.

‘Once we found a cluster, the best part was the digging and finding things. It was a treasure hunt. My first projectile point, I was dancing around this depression – everyone was looking at me like oh-kay, but I was SO happy!”

Larson also worked with geologists from the University of Washington digging soil pits to date tephra layers—layers of volcanic ash—which will help them date the settlements more precisely. Artifacts come from two distinct time periods, one about 6000 years ago and the other, about 3000 thousand years ago.

Larson sifts through soil looking for artifacts.

“It’s interesting that there are two sets of artifacts because the scientists can compare them to see how the two cultures differed and how the technology changed between cultures. These people lived along the coast and now their settlement has been uplifted 40 meters so it’s interesting that people lived in the area through earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.”

During her three-week trip, Larson saw six erupting volcanoes and learned a lot about group decision-making and collaboration. Her experience also gave her a new appreciation for what she sees in museums because, she says, “I know now how much time and effort and planning it takes to get all those things we see in a museum.”

On August 3, Larson returned home, enjoyed her first hot shower and fresh produce in quite a while, but nostalgic for her tent home on the tundra. When we asked her if she would apply to be a PolarTREC teacher again she replied with an enthusiastic ‘YES!”—Marcy Davis

PolarTREC is managed by the Arctic Research Consortium of the United States. Visit their incredible website to meet more PolarTREC teachers: http://www.polartrec.com/

Comments (0) Nov 08 2010

Josh Dugat shows off the Schwarz flag at Portage Glacier near Anchorage. All photos courtesy Josh Dugat

“I’ve lived in the South my whole life. PolarTREC exposed me to a world I never would have known otherwise. I want my students to know that their teacher is a dynamic person who gets excited about discovery. Hopefully, this will motivate them to take advantage of opportunities in their own lives. Even students and staff at Schwarz can be recognized and get to do something extreme.” — Josh Dugat

Inner City School

 Josh Dugat is the only science teacher at Schwarz Academy, one of two alternative schools for the Recovery School District in New Orleans. Schwarz serves students who have been expelled from other schools or who have been found guilty of Class III infractions, or incarcerated for drugs, violence, and other offenses. Dugat’s inner-city classroom can be a revolving door as students come and go throughout the school year.

Into The Wild

It’s a long way from his sweltering classroom to the Arctic, but this year Dugat participated in the PolarTREC program as part of a team working on the Circumpolar Active Layer Monitoring (CALM) network.

Established in 1991, CALM includes researchers from fifteen countries and 175 sites across the Arctic, Antarctica, and several alpine locations where scientists study permafrost.

Arctic Exploration

Dugat’s summer adventure took him about as far from the Gulf Coast as a person can get: First stop, Anchorage, where Dugat, along with Elliot Upin and Kelsey Nyland, attended the North Slope Training Cooperative “Unescorted North Slope” Safety Orientation.

Training

Required of anyone headed to the northern Alaskan oil fields, the daylong training covered accident prevention, emergency response, the dangers of hydrogen sulfide, as well as what to do upon meeting polar bears or other arctic wildlife.

The next day, after a few more training videos at the British Petroleum building downtown, Dugat spent a rainy day with other members of the research team visiting the Anchorage Museum, Independence Gold mine, Eklutna Historical Park and finally, eating a dinner of reindeer sausage at George Washington University graduate student, Ellen Hatleberg’s house. The next day they visited the Portage Glacier and the Alaska Native Heritage Center.

Into the Field

Kelsey Nyland, Josh Dugat, Cathy Sebold, Anna Klene and Elliott Upin cross the Arctic Circle on the Dalton highway.

From Anchorage, Dugat, Upin and Nyland, along with GW Post-Doc Dmitriy Streletskiy drove to Fairbanks, picked up a few more of the project’s scientists—Anna Klene (University of Montana) and Cathy Seybold (USDA)—and headed up the 400-mile Dalton Highway to Prudhoe Bay.

Along the way, the team stopped at two soil monitoring sites to record soil and air temperature, moisture content, precipitation levels, and solar radiation levels. The focus of these sites is to observe conditions affecting the active layer, the upper layer of soil that exists above permafrost and freezes and thaws with the seasons.

Probing the Permafrost (Tour de Alaska)

Duct tape to the rescue! Josh Dugat and Kelsey Nyland repair a damaged data logger tripod.

That was only the beginning of Dugat’s relationship with permafrost. At CALM sites in and around Prudhoe Bay, he became an “active layer prober,” taking two measurements of the active layer depth every 100 meters on 1 square km grids, totaling 242 measurements per grid! In the video below, Dugat explains how it all works:

Permafrost on YouTube

Between stints in Prudhoe Bay, the team checked in at Toolik Field Station. From there they took helicopter shuttles to access remote ‘flux’ sites, where soil and air temperatures are continuously recorded. Dugat spent most of his time repairing tripods and data loggers damaged by interested animals.

Final stop: Barrow. From the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium (BASC), Dugat and the team took a final round of thaw depth measurements on grids established in the 1960s. They also measured the tundra surface with Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) instruments, which use reflected laser light to produce very detailed images.

A Teacher’s Perspective

During the next couple of days in Barrow, Dugat toured the science lab at Barrow High School, and visited the Inupiat Heritage Center. Among his other unusual stops, he also gathered data from a temperature monitor scientists maintain in a permafrost meat cellar.

BASC station manager, Lewis Brower, explained to Dugat the life of a whaling captain (allowing him to taste muktuk – whale blubber and skin). In his last day in town, Dugat caught the end of the Barrow Whalers football game against the Valdez Buccaneers and went for a “Polar Bear” swim in the Arctic Ocean.

Home Again

Now, back in his New Orleans classroom, Dugat is charged with sharing his experiences with his students. He says he wants to inspire them to investigate the unexpected parallels between tundra and bayou.

Climate Change and Katrina

“There’s definitely a climate-change connection, particularly for students who experienced Katrina. Engineering problems associated with land subsidence here in Southeastern Louisiana relate to building concerns for those designing structures on permafrost,” explains Dugat. “Albeit for different reasons, land in both regions exhibits subsidence.”

Dugat also mentions the industrial similarities between the North Slope and Gulf Coast. BP is the primary operator for North Slope oil wells, and has a particular presence in the New Orleans area, given the events surrounding last spring’s Deepwater Horizon Spill.

Portrait of a Teaching Career

After Hurricane Katrina devastated the New Orleans public school system in 2005, many doors were opened for education reform in the city. Dugat came to New Orleans in 2009 as one of many Teach for America teachers. Once Dugat completed the Teach for America certification program, which trains K-12 teachers and places them in high-need areas, Dugat became passionate about student achievement in the Crescent City.

Teaching at an alternative school has its own unique brand of challenges. Dugat doesn’t always know how long a student will remain in his class or when another will show up. Consequently, engaging his 9^th-12^th grade students in complex topics like climate change can be difficult. Exposure, Dugat says, is key. Parlaying his experience into a teachable moment helps the students contextualize the information.

“It is doubtful they would ever hear about it (Arctic climate change),” explains Dugat. “It’s debatable whether permafrost directly influences their daily lives, but if students are made aware of its presence, then they are made aware of the world between here and the Arctic, and that everything in between is connected. It’s important for them to read about and hear about things they and the people they know have never done before.”—Marcy Davis

Comments (0) Sep 20 2010

“I’m getting so into digging for artifacts. I love it. It’s so satisfying. It’s like reading a good book – once you start, you can’t stop. And really, we are turning back the pages of history. To think no one has touched these tools for thousands of years, and then we get to be the one to touch it first. We are the ones to bring them back into the light after eons in the cold blackness below ground.” – Karl Horeis, July 28, PolarTREC teacher

PolarTREC teacher Karl Horeis gets his hands dirty in Raven Bluff, Alaska, during an archeological dig as a PolarTREC teacher. All photos courtesy Karl Horeis

A Motivated Teacher

Meet Karl Horeis (pronounced hore-ice), a super-enthusiastic third and fourth grade teacher from Wheat Ridge, Colorado. Horeis spent two weeks working with an international archaeology team at the Raven Bluff excavation site near Kivalina, Alaska, as part of the  2010 PolarTrec Program.

This hand-drawn map shows where Karl Horeis and his crew spent much of the summer on an archaeological dig.

In the video below, he gives us an introduction to the project during the May PolarTREC orientation in Fairbanks.

Karl Horeis PolarTREC intro

Intrepid Curiosity

Horeis, who met his wife, Kitty (also a teacher) while working in Antarctica, grew up in Portland, Oregon. Throughout his life he explored the West by hiking, climbing, and sailing. Since 2007 he’s been teaching at Foothills Academy, an independent preK-12 school in suburban Denver.

PolarTREC Immersion

Horeis’ journey to Raven Bluff began during the PolarTREC teacher training in Fairbanks in May. Unlike most other teachers, the project’s lead scientists live in Fairbanks, so he was able to spend some time getting to know them.

The Team: Back row, left to right: Courtney Cooper (BLM), Stand Hermans (Hermans Helicopters), Stefan Heidenreich (University of Cologne), Bill Hedman (BLM), Daryl Vandeweg (BLM), Gerad Smith (BLM, UAF), Ian Buvit (Central Washington University), Karl Horeis. Front row, L to R: Craig McCaa (BLM), Ines Medved (University of Cologne), Jeff Rasic (University of Alaska Museum), Jess Petersen (BLM, UAF).

First, Horeis met Jeff Rasic, curator of Archaeology at the University of Alaska Museum of the North and sometimes archaeologist for the National Park Service. Rasic specializes in the archaeology of northern hunter gatherers, particularly the peoples living in Alaska at the end of the ice age.

He also met Bill Hedman, an archaeologist for the Bureau of Land Management (Central Yukon Field Office), who, with a colleague, discovered the Raven Bluff site in 2007. They talked about the upcoming expedition and Rasic gave Horeis a lesson in knapping, the method by which ancient peoples made stone tools from flint, chert and obsidian.

Enlisting and Engaging His Students

Experiential education; Karl Horeis's students learn what their teacher will be doing in Alaska by doing it themselves.

Following the training, Horeis returned to Colorado and enlisted his students to help him prepare for the field. First, he salted the school’s garden boxes for a mock dig. Students excavated obsidian tools, corn cobs, pottery shards and some items sent over by.

Next, Horeis brought archaeology a little closer to home by having his class investigate plains peoples and cliff dwellers who lived in and around Colorado. The Denver Museum of Nature and Science sent excavation kit boxes for the kids to dig up real artifacts.

Just like the pros! Third and fourth grade students at Foothills Academy practice excavating with tools provided by the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

Finally, they talked more about Horeis’ Alaska trip – theories about the Bering Land Bridge and what life was like for the people who lived in northern Alaska 11,000 years ago.

Back To The Field

In July, Horeis flew back to Fairbanks where the field team gathered for required BLM field training. During the aviation course they learned about fire safety and first aid. In the bear awareness class they learned about bear behavior then practiced spraying bear pepper spray. The course culminated in firearms training…just in case.

“We each had to be able to fire 5 rounds from this shotgun in 25 seconds and hit an 8”x11” target at 50’ – pretty wild for an elementary school teacher,” says Horeis

Going Further Afield

After two days in Fairbanks, the team flew to Kotzebue, a small town of 300 people that sits isolated on a peninsula about 30 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Horeis explored town and familiarized himself with his computer and satellite phone back at the BLM bunkhouse.

Next, a small Cessna flew them to the Red Dog Mine, an open pit zinc-lead mine with an airstrip.  At the Red Dog, they met up with Stan Hermens of Hermens helicopters for their final flight out to Raven Bluff, about 30 miles from the Inupiat village of Kivalina.

Final Destination

The team erected their tent city on a gravel bar adjacent to Raven Bluff on the Kivalina River, a sixty-mile long ribbon that flows from the western Brooks Range to the Chukchi Sea.

Karl Horeis digs deep at Raven Bluff.

Raven Bluff’s unique location next to the river and perpendicular to prevailing summer winds resulted in artifacts being quickly buried in thick layers of soil. The researchers hoped to find fluted projectile points – tools like knives and arrowheads, which would provide insight about the earliest peoples to the Americas. Fossilized plants and bits of bone could help constrain the age of the tools as well as provide some insight about what these people ate.

Archeology 101

Horeis spent a couple of days watching and learning from his team, washing and sorting (stone or bone) artifacts. After that, Horeis was rewarded with his own meter square pit – Test Unit #8.

First order of business – remove the turf and waste fill from last year’s survey pits. Next, he carefully scraped away layers of soil, centimeters at a time, using a trowel or hand broom. If he found something right away, he was to sort it.

The remaining soil Horeis shook through a screen and carefully combed over what was left.  His best day of field archaeology was the day he found two microblades, tiny chert precision-cutting tools.

“I was giddy to be the first one to touch this ancient tool [for] very first time in 11,000 years!” Horeis effuses, “These were the ancestors of all Native Americans!”

Roughing It

During two weeks in the field Horeis experienced fog, rain, drizzle, and mosquitoes, managed to fit in a few hikes across the tussocks, surveyed for more sites from a helicopter, and hosted two Kivalina high school students, Tia Adams and Jackie Norton, who came out to help with the dig. The trip ended with a radio interview back in Kotzebue before the long flight back to Denver.

Home Again

Now that school has started, Horeis is eager to share his experience with students. He’s having them excavate again, but this time, Horeis says, it’s a lot more realistic.

He’s assigned four students to each field crew. Each crew measures a one meter unit and then divides it into quadrants so that students have their own area in the excavation pit.

Horeis’ objective, he says, is to “pass on my enthusiasm for archaeology. This is the ultimate detective story. I tell them that archaeology is like puzzle pieces scattered around. We have to find the pieces and put them back together. There is excitement in the mystery and in developing hypotheses. And, of course, the dig is really fun.”

Karl Horeis’ next big adventure: being a dad. He and wife, Kitty, welcomed bouncing baby boy, Holt, in March. So, everyone is happy he’s back from the tundra.  —Marcy Davis

Comments (0) Sep 10 2010

Build bridges between your science, K-12 students, teachers, and the public 

Members of the Lake El’gygytgyn research project have some fun while laying over in Pevek, Russia on the way to the field site. Photo courtesy ARCUS

PolarTREC – Teachers and Researchers Exploring and Collaborating is seeking applications from researchers who are interested in hosting a teacher on their polar research project during the 2011 summer and 2011-2012 winter field seasons. 

Galvan takes a break from sampling to pose with two tranquilized polar bears. Galvan worked with researchers Merav Ben-David, Henry Harlow, and John Whiteman studying the behaviors of in land and ice-bound polar bears. Photo courtesy ARCUS

Why host a teacher on your polar research project? By incorporating a teacher in your field work, you gain an enthusiastic team member that assists with research and camp activities, helps get the word out about your research project to students and public audiences, and isn’t afraid of an adventure out in the cold or with numerous mosquitoes!Most importantly, PolarTREC helps you share your excitement for science and important knowledge about the polar regions with the next generation of scientists and citizens.
  

Background Information 

A program of the Arctic Research Consortium of the U.S. (ARCUS) and funded by the National Science Foundation from 2010-2013, PolarTREC is currently beginning its fifth year of matching teachers with researchers for 2-6 week teacher research experiences in the Arctic and Antarctic. PolarTREC teachers and researchers are matched based on similar science interests. 

Selection Process

Selected researchers will interview top applicants and choose which teacher will join their team. While in the field, teachers and researchers communicate extensively with their colleagues, communities, and students of all ages across the globe, using a variety of interactive tools, which are part of the online PolarTREC Virtual Base Camp. 

PolarTREC Teacher, Cristina Galvan from California, gives two enthusiastic thumbs up while on board the US Coast Guard Icebreaker Polar Sea in October 2009. Photo courtesy ARCUS

More Information:  

A one-hour informational webinar (web seminar) will be held specifically for researchers interested in hosting a PolarTREC teacher on their polar research project on Tuesday, 31 August 2010 at 10:00 am AKDT (11:00 am PDT, 12:00 pm MDT, 1:00 pm CDT, 2:00 pm EDT). Please register for the event at: http://www.polartrec.com/about/researcher-webinar by Monday, 30 August 2010. 

Apply Online: http://www.polartrec.com/researchers/application 

PolarTREC researchers must be at U.S. Institutions. Applications from researchers on NSF-funded projects will receive priority in the selection process. Researchers should have secured funding for their research project prior to applying; if funding is pending and you would still like to host a teacher or if you are unable to meet this deadline, but would like to participate, please contact PolarTREC at info@polartrec.com or 907-474-1600 to discuss your situation. Researcher Application Deadline: Friday, 1 October 2010 

–Kristin Timm, ARCUS

Comments (0) Aug 30 2010

About a week after students and teachers from Denmark, Greenland, and the United States bid one another farewell in Kangerlussuaq, the synergy and camaraderie of the 2010 Joint Committee “Science in Education” week continues to grow, as evidenced by promises to continue their new collaboration via Skype, a Google Web group, several blogs, and plans to learn each others’ language.

Sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Embassy in Copenhagen, and the New York Air National Guard, the “Sci Ed” week fostered a tight-knit group that shared a love for science, the cold, and adventure.

“The students were all very interested and engaged in the science,” said Polar Field Service’s Robbie Score, who accompanied the crew during the week, July 19-27. “They asked a lot of questions and all really liked each other. They quickly became like a family.  A functional family.”

Family Portrait: The 2010 SciEd group just wrapped up a week on the ice. All photos Robbie Score

Welcome to the Ice

The team consisted of 15 students and teachers from Greenland, Denmark, and the United States. Convening  in Kangerlussuaq on the west coast of Greenland, they were indoctrinated into the ice their first full day, July 20. After a morning spent gathering all the cold weather gear they’d need for the week, the team drove to the trailhead and hiked to the ice sheet.

Teacher Marti Canipe blogged about her impressions and said the first site of the ice was incredible.

“To say that seeing the edge of the Greenland Ice Sheet is spectacular doesn’t begin to convey what this experience is like,” she wrote. “The wall of ice is massive and at this point it is only a fraction of the thickest part of the ice. To stand there and look at the ice sheet stretching off into the distance and to know that it is covering the vast majority of Greenland is an awe inspiring moment.”

To Summit Station

The next day the group flew to Summit Station and were surprised to find the research outpost full of international scientists and experiments, said Score. Even the Greenlander students had little idea of the scope and size of Summit; indeed the students said they felt like tourists.

So they set about sight-seeing. With a trip to the Flux facility and a presentation on unmanned airborne vehicles (UAV) by scientist Rune Storvold, they learned about instrumentation that measures albedo.

The crew learns about Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAV) from Rune Storvold.

They also explored two snow pits where they examined the myriad layers. Next up was a trip to the Temporary Atmospheric Watch Observatory (TAWO) where they learned how  scientists at the station measure, record, and track blacck arbon, CO2, and other particles and gases in the atmosphere.

Andy Clarke and Marie McLain take the group to the Flux facility at Summit Station.

Finally, they had the opportunity to launch a NOAA balloon from Summit’s Mobile Science Facility. These balloons  help scientists study clouds in order to better understand the atmosphere and improve climate pattern models. The scientists  use sonar, radar, and lasers to figure many different aspects about the cloud altitude, height and structure, and the students listened attentively to all the presentations.

Snowed Out

On deck the next day was a trip to observe the ice core drilling at NEEM, but a four-day blizzard made travel impossible, much to the dismay of the students. Nonetheless they were good sports, playing scrabble and other games as they killed time while the trip organizers came up with Plan B: back to Kangar.

They were not to be disappointed. In Kangar the PI from NEEM gave an overview of the science and drilling operations, and the next day the group went to Kellyville and also hiked to a glacier where they did some experiments of their own (see photos below).

Six students, two from Greenland, two from Denmark, and two from the United Sates take pH measurements at Russell Glacier.

A NEEM Daytrip

On July 25 the weather cleared and the group flew to NEEM, much to their extreme delight.

“The Denmark and Greenland students kept saying they couldn’t believe they were actually at NEEM,” said Score. “They were very animated.”

Success

In all, the week was a tremendous success, said Score. In addition to being exposed to a wide variety of science disciplines, the students met field staff at the research stations who have unique careers that the kids might never have known about. Meeting and making friends from other countries also expanded the students’ horizons, and all of the teachers reported learning much and returning home with renewed energy to teach once school starts this fall.

And who knows? Perhaps in a few years the students will be back as researchers themselves! —Rachel Walker

Comments (0) Aug 03 2010

Photo: Claude Larson, courtesy PolarTREC 2010

“Another stylish item that is a must for your wardrobe would be the bug shirt. It allows airflow, to keep you looking and feeling great in your insect swarmed environment, while keeping bugs at bay. Round out the outfit with a pair of fashionable leather gloves and you are ready for a day at the peninsula.”

So writes PolarTREC teacher Claude Larson (Jefferson Township Middle School in Oak Ridge, New Jersey). She’s preparing to join NSF-funded anthropologist Ezra Zubrow (SUNY-Buffalo) for a month-long trip to the Kamchatka Peninsula region of Russia, to collect information on how past human settlements have adapted to abrupt climate change in the Arctic.

As part of CH2M HILL’s support to the National Science Foundation’s arctic research program, Polar Field Services sends specialized clothing and communications gear to PolarTREC teachers before they leave for field work. We’ve grown accustomed to the odd assortment of gear we provide, so it’s refreshing and funny to view polar fashion through the eyes of one who hasn’t been shuffling bug shirts and bunny boots lo these many years.

Larson is one of a dozen or so teachers selected this year by the Arctic Research Consortium of the U.S. (ARCUS) to accompany researchers on field trips, the better to return to the classroom and convey the essence, importance, and excitement of polar research to their students. Make a habit of checking the PolarTREC Web site for updates.

Comments (0) Jun 15 2010