Time to Depart Barrow and Return Home…

It has been an awesome two weeks working with other members of the NGEE Arctic project in Barrow. A number of friendships have been forged by working and living in close proximity to so many scientists across the project. I am continually amazed by the dedication of those involved in the project and their willingness to endure crowded apartments, sharing food and one refrigerator, and coordinating their research with others as we come and go from the field. Winters are especially challenging given the cold temperatures, long days in the field, and the tendency to get frustrated that you may forget something while in the field or if things just happen to not go according to plan. We do try to minimize these events, but they seem to arise once a day for someone.

So, it’s been a fun and productive week in Barrow. Our team has collected permafrost cores, prepared for snowmelt, installed cameras, and conducted a variety of geophysical surveys across the landscapes of the Barrow Environmental Observatory. My thanks to everyone who made this field campaign a successful one and for all the data from which new knowledge will be derived for both understanding and modeling the Arctic in a warming climate.

More Cores; This Time Looking for an Ice Wedge…

Earlier in the week we collected a number of active layer and permafrost cores for a variety of uses, including geophysics, biogeochemistry, and microbiology. These will be distributed to team members and analyses performed back at their at home institutions. However, we still have need of additional cores specifically for the purpose of confirming presence of massive ice distributed across the subsurface of the BEO landscape. Massive ice describes features like ice wedges that are large in extent and consist mostly of ice. The process of ice wedge formation begins during the winter when cold air and ground temperatures cause the ground to contract and then crack with those cracks filling with water that then freezes. The process repeats itself for centuries to millennia with the end result being large ice formations in the subsurface.

Previous geophysical surveys conducted by the NGEE Arctic team have identified areas where ice wedges might be present and several deep cores would be useful to verify what the LBNL geoscientists are seeing in the electrical resistivity (ER) measurements, along with other field techniques like ground penetrating radar (GPR). So, early one morning John, Craig, Baptiste, and Ken loaded up the Big Beaver and using a snow machine they pulled the sled-mounted rig out to the BEO where we would drill to 2 meters or more in search of ice.

Ice wedges are known to occur at shallow depths along troughs of polygons. The drill rig was positioned over such areas and cores carefully taken. This could take 30 minutes to an hour to get intact cores to depth, but the presence of an ice wedge was pretty easy to determine. What we typically observed while drilling was the presence of a dark brown to black layer in the upper 20 cm of active layer that was rich in organic matter. Drilling deeper we often saw a gray to much lighter mineral soil, and then, upon drilling into an ice wedge, we observed white, almost pure ice chips. The difference in coloration was, of course, quite striking.

 

Once an intact core was extracted from the SIPRE device, we also saw these distinct layers of organic matter, mineral soil, and then ice. I should note that we were joined by Shan Dou (red parka), a PhD student in the Earth and Planetary Science Department at UC Berkeley for this component of our field studies. She is working with Jonathan Ajo-Franklin (LBNL) and has an interest in geophysics and subsurface properties of permafrost environments. This was Shan’s first trip to the Arctic and I really enjoyed working with her a few days before leaving Barrow. She will remain in Barrow with John, Craig, and Baptiste for another few days as more geophysical evaluation of the BEO is conducted. It’s a great opportunity for her to be exposed to such a remarkable environment, work with a committed team of scientists, and participate in the actual sampling of permafrost that will form the basis of her PhD studies. I wish her and all the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. students working on the NGEE Arctic project good luck with the coming field season!

Keeping an Eye on the Tundra…

Scientists in the NGEE Arctic project have a number of automated instruments operating in the field, including eddy covariance towers, soil respiration chambers, transparent chambers of measuring evapotranspiration (ET), and ERT systems for subsurface geophysics. John Peterson and Baptiste Dafflon, both from LBNL, have been working this week to install two cameras that will capture pictures of the tundra landscape in and among these various instruments. Earlier in the week, a short tower was installed at our field site along with a large weather-proof box that holds all the sensitive electronics.

 

 

This morning Baptiste and John mounted the two cameras into a plastic housing that will protect them once installed on the field tower. They also took time to program the data logger so that everything would work when taken to the field. One camera gathers spectra in the red, green, and blue (RGB) region, while the other collects images in the near-infrared region of the spectra. Both cameras are programmed to take pictures 2 to 4 times daily throughout the season, and they can be accessed remotely. The primary objective is to acquire visual images and spectral data during snowmelt and to associate spatial distribution of snow and water across the landscape with changes in subsurface properties determined simultaneously with the ERT. A secondary objective is to associate CO₂ and CH₄ fluxes measured with eddy covariance and with our CO₂ and ET chambers to observed changes in inundation and vegetation phenology throughout the season.

 

 

 

It was a cold snow machine ride to our field site. John and Baptiste were able to mount and test the cameras in their planned configuration. After making few modifications tonight at the UMIAQ machine shop, everything should be on target for the final installation within the coming days.

 

Finally, and as mentioned earlier, the cameras are meant to provide an additional data stream that will help us interpret other types of plant, soil, and water measurements. These kinds of installations are increasingly being deployed in remote locations where people are not necessarily present every day in the field. It is nice that high-resolution data collected in space and time using a ground-based system can be used along with similar data gathered from UAVs, planes, and satellites. This will be helpful as these multi-scale data products are merged to derive a more complete understanding of processes at plot, landscape, and regional scales. We anticipate that NASA and their planned Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) project (http://above.nasa.gov/) will be sponsored through Diane Wickland's Terrestrial Ecology Program and will ultimately become a valuable partner in this scaling endeavor.

Hydrology Team Gets an Early Start…

Although it is still several weeks or more until the spring snowmelt, our team of hydrologists from LANL and UAF are in Barrow this week to collect data that will help us model patterns of water distribution within polygon landscapes. Cathy and Joel from Los Alamos, New Mexico were joined today by Larry and Bob from Fairbanks, Alaska to begin the installation of water sampling stations across the four NGEE Arctic sites on the BEO. Cathy and Larry have worked with members of our modeling team to select the most appropriate locations to install the stations where we will determine saturated hydraulic conductivity later this summer. This is a parameter that our modelers need; it describes the rate at which water moves within soils. It has been a difficult value to glean from the published literature, so we will measure this directly in the field. Aerial images and LiDAR maps of our study site were used to identify likely areas to locate our measurements and John (LBNL) was able to quickly locate those points using high-precision GPS.

Once the locations were identified, it was then a matter of removing snow so we could visually identify the underlying landscape features we were interested in (rims, troughs, and centers). In some cases this required shoveling just a few inches down to polygon rims, but other areas had more snow and required removing 2.5 to 3 feet of hard-packed snow. Fortunately we had only 10 to 12 of these “pits” to dig out during the day. Joel and Bob then drilled holes of varying depths using a one-person auger engine to which we attached a SIPRE coring device. This procedure not only will allow us to prepare for measurements of hydraulic conductivity later in the summer, but also to recover a core of active layer and permafrost soil. These cores were, of course frozen, intact, and we could often remove them with no breaks. Having an intact core will facilitate analysis of thermal properties, soil carbon, and certain aspects of microbiology later in the laboratory.  We could make some simple measurements in the field like length of sample and note soil texture and any ice cryostructure. Cathy recorded all this in her field notebook and later transcribed data into computer files. This information will be shared with the larger team and we will make sure that final parameters and interpretation of data is communicated to our modelers.

 

 

 

 

NGEE Arctic Broadcasts “Live” from the Coastal Plain of Alaska…

Scientists working on the NGEE Arctic project have never been shy about outreach and communication when it comes to the exciting research that we are doing both in the field and laboratory. Over the last two years we have implemented a number of innovative approaches to informing people of the challenges we are tackling in the Arctic; we have a project web site, Facebook, Flickr, monthly “Science Talks”, and postings to our project blog. Today we took another step by broadcasting live from the tundra where we are working for the next couple of weeks. The Google Hangout was led by the Public Affairs Department at LBNL, and featured scientists working in Barrow and others in laboratories back in Berkeley, CA. Also joining us in this endeavor were students from Oakland, CA and Green Bay, Wisconsin. Craig Ulrich and I setup a laptop and video camera in the field and “went live” at 10:00pm. We were introduced by Dan Krotz from LBNL and then Craig and I talked about the NGEE Arctic project and about the geophysical and permafrost sampling tasks that our team are undertaking this week. Although we experienced a few technical glitches, everything went smoothly and the students seemed to enjoy seeing science in action. They asked some really great questions too! A special thanks to the students and teachers that made this a successful and learning experience.

Permafrost Cores from the Tundra…

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.

 

 

Getting a Start with Geophysics…

Last night John, Craig, and Baptiste arrived in Barrow. These three have been part of the NGEE Arctic project from the beginning or actually slightly before the beginning. Our project officially launched in spring of 2012, but our geophysical characterization of the Barrow Environmental Observatory (BEO) started in September, 2011. We visited the Barrow area as part of a pre-project tour of Alaska in August 2011 and the team immediately saw opportunities to begin sub-surface research of the ice-rich tundra environment. So this group, along with Susan, Yuxin, Jonathan, Tim, and Haruko, all from LBNL has a fair amount of experience working in the Arctic.

In preparation for work this week John, Craig, and Baptiste spent the morning sorting through the dozen or more boxes shipped ahead of time to Barrow. UMIAQ stored all the boxes in Building 553 where our supplies can be a kept dry and secure. We spent an hour organizing instruments, materials, and supplies; and found that we were missing two boxes. They were not to be found in any of the usual places. So, with a little help from UMIAQ, we finally determined that the two missing boxes were still at Northern Air Cargo (NAC) in town. I drove to the airport during lunch and was happy to locate the boxes within a few minutes of searching the warehouse. This meant that we had everything needed for a productive two weeks of geophysical studies.

 

Once all boxes were accounted for and equipment sorted, John and Baptiste started assembling the OhmMapper resistivity system. Our team has previously worked with using electrical resistivity before to characterize sub-surface properties of active layer and permafrost, but that work has largely been with a static system. i.e., stainless steel electrodes inserted in the ground. The OhmMapper is composed of a series of receivers and transmitters that, when towed behind a snow machine, allow sub-surface profiles to be determined in a continuous manner. It is possible to acquire a lot of geophysical information in a very short period of time. We will be using this system in a couple of days.

 

 

While John and Baptiste were working on the OhmMapper system, mounting it on one of the wooden sleds, Craig and I headed out to the BEO on snow machines. We received safety training and a proficiency check ride from Brower Frantz earlier in the day. Travel across the tundra was relatively quick and we saw plenty of caribou en route to the BEO control shed. Craig and others from LBNL have arranged for us to broadcast a Google Hangout on Thursday morning and we wanted to check internet connections from our planned field location. Everything went according to plan and we will link live with high school and middle school students in California and Wisconsin for a discussion of research being conducted in the NGEE Arctic project.

 

Finally, I recalled seeing an interesting Inupiaq Word for the Month written on the white board at the UMIAQ office. I went back this afternoon and snapped a picture. The word is “Cooperation,” and it is one of the core values for the native people in this area. The word has some interesting attributes, especially in relation to how people interact with one another in the workplace and beyond.