As I walked into his office, I picked up what I thought
was a new glossy brochure highlighting science and technology at ORNL. I was
pleased to see that one of those highlights was of our work in the Arctic. The
picture that accompanied the article shows Victoria harvesting above-ground
plant biomass from one of her vegetation plots last year at our field research
site on the Barrow Environmental Observatory (BEO). Victoria is a post-doc working
with Rich, Colleen, and others on the vegetation dynamics tasks and has a keen
interest in plant community composition and processes like root growth and
distribution of biomass throughout the soil profile.
I sent the picture to Victoria who is in Barrow again
this summer. A quick response indicated that while Victoria was pleased to
enjoy her 15 minutes of fame, she didn't know that it would come in the form of
a picture showing her sitting on the tundra, wearing a bug jacket, and holding
a pair of scissors. I had to laugh. Getting a career started in global change
biology is a tricky business, and I agree that field work can at times lack the
glamor of other scientific disciplines! However, I suspect that Victoria will
have the opportunity to enjoy many more minutes of fame because of her hard
work and attention to detail, I'm glad that she is part of the project.
So, what about my NGEE Arctic briefing of Thom Mason? It
went well. He has a great understanding of all the work going on across the
laboratory. Climate modeling and the importance of field and laboratory
measurements that serve to support those models is an area familiar to him. He
even had comments about the NGEE Arctic blog. Having thought about it for a few
hours now, maybe Thom would enjoy going to Alaska like Martin Keller, Associate
Laboratory Director, and others did last year? That was a great trip! Let's
see, we could...
