Although the weather has been great with bright skies and
no wind, the temperatures do seem colder than last year. This morning, the
temperatures were -25C, but we were confident that we could operate with few
problems under those conditions. Our first job, however, was to secure the
drill rig and other supplies to wooden sleds and transport those to the field.
This took some time, but by 9:00am we were headed out of the garage and off to the
field. Larry, Bob, and Craig drove the snow machines while the rest of us
headed south on Cake Eater road in our truck.
As we made our way across the tundra to our field site, the snow depth appeared less than it did last year. The vegetation that inhabits the raised rims and ridges around the ice-wedge polygons is still visible. Last year, it was buried under a significant amount of snow.
Once we reached our field site, which is several kilometers
from the road, we located the sampling sites that Craig and Bob marked
yesterday using GPS. The drill rig was easily raised into place and within
minutes Ken was coring the first sample. It was good to see that the process
seemed to go faster than last year; maybe we have learned a few things given
our past experiences. The cores came out of the SIPRE auger pretty much
intact which will make our job much easier back in the laboratory.
While the main team was coring, Bob was checking out the
network of monitoring sites that he, Bill Cable, and Vladimir Romanovsky
established last fall. We have temperature probes at multiple depths along with
sensors for measuring soil moisture, heat flux, snow depth, and radiation. All
this information will be useful as we parameterize and test our models of
permafrost dynamics. A few sensors need to be replaced so Bob will probably
spend the next day or two doing that as the rest of us continue to obtain permafrost
cores.
