It snowed several inches last night and dawned cloudy, but
we were up early and ready for our first day of drilling permafrost cores on
the BEO. Surprisingly we were prepared within an hour; having done this now for
two years helped! The Big Beaver hydraulic drill rig was on one wooden sled and
all of our packed miscellaneous materials and supplies were on another ready
for transport to the field site. Craig drove one snow machine and Ken drove the
other. Having the drill rig mounted on a sled made it relatively easy to get to
the field and to position into place. The mast was raised into place, secured,
and we cautiously began taking cores. In years past we restricted our coring to
the surface 1 meter, but this year we wanted to obtain deeper cores so we were
prepared to drill to 2, possibly 3 meters. Our reasons for this were two-fold.
First, we wanted to know more about soil carbon at depth. Second, previous
geophysical surveys of certain sites suggested that deep unfrozen zones might
be present potentially corresponding to saline permafrost. If we could confirm
this then it will open opportunities to conduct microbiological studies and
associate novel microbes with CO2 or CH4 fluxes from the
deep sub-surface. It is still too early to tell if these unfrozen layers are
present or if we will be successful with deeper cores, but our first few holes
were encouraging.
