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