Mosquito Season

A personal perspective at one of our field sites yesterday.  It's pretty low quality video, but all those specks floating around and the ones that are all over my legs that you can't see are mosquitos.  This is lazy blogging.

It's been really dry here, dry enough to cause surface flow and ponded water at our water tracks to disappear almost entirely.  There is also a fire burning 50 miles to the west of Toolik Field Station, which I'm told is typical for this time of year in Fairbanks, but not this far north.

A Toolik Birthday

On Wednesday I turned a meager 24 years old.  Birthdays are becoming more routine as I get older, but at least they're always an acceptable reason for shirking normal work duties.  Unusual work duties, however, should not be shirked.  In my case, they include flying around in a helicopter for what really wasn't a good reason, but in was on our schedule, so what the hell.  The field station has two small Robinson helos (as they're called around here) for carrying heavy equipment to remote field sites in the summer and for times when speed is a necessary part of any research group's efforts.  The idea for us on Wednesday was to pick up a bunch of water samples that are being collected and stored automatically by a device called an ISCO at our six water tracks.  Unfortunately, they seem to be generally unreliable and each one only had a fraction of the water samples it was supposedly collecting.  But we went ahead and picked them up by helo anyway.  Here are some pictures:

The little helo I rode in.

The other helo that Margit was in, next to one of our water track sites.
The water track is highlighted by the dark willow vegetation that grows in many water tracks.

A view to the north along the Kuparuk River basin, criss-crossed by the pipeline and Dalton Highway.

Bird's-eye view of another of our water tracks on the west-facing hillslope.

After a short afternoon's work, we went back to Toolik for dinner, where my advisor and some friends surprised me with a homemade ice cream cake depicting a "Pyrenees" mountain scene, complete with gummy bear bears.

Amazing.

Then that evening I got to skip out on sample processing and went back to the Aufeis with a big group of people.  After three weeks of warm weather, the ice was beginning to break apart, and it was particularly beautiful in the evening light.

The ice field is breaking apart in the warm temperatures.

The groundwater that wells up to produce the Aufeis freezes very quickly forming these "candle" shards.

A waterfall where the stream is being diverted by the ice.

A tiny ecosystem flourishing on the dolomite valley walls.

Ah!  An ice cave monster!

Exploring a tunnel in the ice.

Jeb and Molly know that the candle ice makes for the best glass of whiskey on the rocks.