Cleaning Up!

Here in Joseph, volunteers have been working hard all week to renovate the city park with some fancy new play structures. My housemate suggested that I volunteer too, since it would be a good opportunity to meet some other people in town. I was happy to oblige, and showed up this afternoon ready to work up a sweat. Since it was the last day of the build, after taking down a few tents, I got the inglorious and delightful task of shop vacuuming plastic shavings out of the grass. I'm certain I made a good impression with the members of my new community, because several came over to either apologize for the absurdity of the situation or laugh about it with me. The lady who vacuums grass, yup that's me!

It actually felt pretty rewarding. I filled several large trash cans with tiny plastic shavings that came from all the playground equipment having been cut out of dimensional plastic. Since the park is directly adjacent and upslope of the Wallowa River, I feel like I've done a good thing for the aquatic community of this town too.

The playground build at Joseph City Park. Minimal plastic shavings remain under that Safeway tent!

Slickrock Falls- accurately named, whether colloquial or not.

This evening I went over to Hurricane Creek to check out the trail conditions, and was delighted to find only a few patches of snow between the trailhead and what I've heard called "Slickrock Falls" a few miles up valley. Spring has barely arrived in that north-draining catchment, with buttercups as the sole bloomers that I noticed. Even the buds on aspen had not burst yet. I wonder if there are glacier lilies in this area like there was in McCall, because that was one of the first things I remember coming up last spring. Animal sightings were sparse too, though I did see a couple hen grouse on the way down Hurricane Creek Road, and Jasper terrorized a jackrabbit along the trail. I'm looking forward to exploring further along down the trail soon.

Spring in Joseph

Spring is here, and as usual, it brings with it a change in geography for me. Instead of migrating to the Arctic, or feeling like I finally left it when spring came in McCall, today I moved to Joseph, Oregon. Jasper's here as my first mate, currently enjoying his rank by snoring on my knee.

The view of the Wallowas from my new home in Joseph, OR this morning. Photo credit: SV.

While in Joseph, I'll work part-time at Backyard Gardens, a small vegetable and flower farm, and continue my dissertation research and writing. I'll also be acquainting myself with the surrounding region, which includes such diverse places as the Eagle Cap Wilderness, Hell's Canyon, and the Zumwalt Prairie.

This year I have an unusual context- it's been the wettest spring on record across much of the Pacific US, and the impacts were clear on the drive here. The Wallowas were thickly frosted with snow, and while there wasn't as much flooding as when I came here to interview a month ago, the rivers and streams I crossed were still swollen with meltwater. Still, life pushes stubbornly against its environment, and the fields and forests are coming alive with the delicate green of new leaves. I'm excited to closely observe what the summer brings and invest myself along side it.

Precipitation this winter has been unusually high, compared to the 1985-2010 average, and dark green areas such as Pocatello, ID and Joseph, OR have seen record totals.

Project Introduction and Spring 2013 Snowpack

My PhD work focuses on physical controls on water storage and flux on Arctic hillslopes. I'm going to start sharing some of this work on here in order to practice communicating this information simply, clearly, and concisely. Here it goes.

In many parts of the Arctic, mean annual temperatures are below freezing. Over time, this has caused permafrost, permanently frozen ground, to develop. In my study area in the foothills of the Brooks Range, permafrost is continuous over large spatial areas and extends below ground to several hundred meters depth. However, something changes every summer: a thin upper layer of the permafrost, called the "active layer" warms and thaws as air temperatures soar above freezing for a few months- usually from late May to mid-September. This brief time window allows plants and other organisms to flourish on and in the unfrozen soils. Water too is able to flow into and out of the subsurface, carrying with it the substances that it dissolves such as mineral salts that weather out of the glacial till that makes up the hills and valleys, as well as the nutrients that feed biotic productivity. As the active layer deepens over the summer, the amount of time that water spends in the ground and the depths and subsurface materials that it can reach grow as well. This is one seasonal component to how water storage and flux change in the Arctic.

Water enters Arctic landscapes through rain and snow and leaves through runoff, shallow subsurface flow, sublimation, evaporation, and transpiration by organisms. Unlike many places on Earth, hardly any water is able to penetrate deeply into the ground to become part of a long-lasting groundwater reservoir because the permafrost prevents it. The difference in precipitation phase is another seasonal difference in water storage and flux in the Arctic, although the change is causes is stochastic. Over winter, snow accumulates and is stored on the surface in snowpack. A small portion sublimates, but most of the stored snow is lost during spring snowmelt. This is a rapid event, where the snowpack becomes isothermal then melts away, usually within the span of a week or even a few days. Most of the water quickly flows in the stream network, causing the stream water discharge to increase dramatically too. This flood pulse is the largest in most years, but sometimes summer rainstorms can cause even greater flood events.

One of the datasets that I collect is the amount of water stored in the snowpack on the hillslopes of my study area at the beginning of my field seasons. Here's the procedure:

Dig a snowpit to the base of the snowpack.

Describe the snow profile and identify layers in the snow for sampling.

Take samples of a known volume and weigh in the lab to determine density.

The amount of water stored in snowpack at the end of winter in 2013 was unusually large. For comparison, on average 12.9 cm of water were stored in snowpack in the spring each year in Upper Kuparuk River watershed in the mid-90s. From the 24 hillslope snowpits I dug, I measured an average of 23.6 cm of snow water equivalent. However, half the sampling locations I chose target features called water tracks that form in areas of convergent topography that drain the hillslopes. The other half are from non-water track locations. Comparing the two, I found that the water stored in the water track snowpack was significantly higher, likely because they form topographic lows and contain emergent shrubby vegetation that trap snow when the wind redistributes it over the winter.

Overall, the average snow water equivalent in the water track locations was ~28 cm, while the hillslope sites contained ~18 cm. This is still significantly greater than other years and makes for an exciting peek into what could happen in the future, when climate models predict that over winter Arctic snowfall will increase. I would also predict that ground temperatures, active layer thaw, and potentially water storage in the water track may be greater than the surrounding hillslope. Next, I need to investigate the timing of snowpack formation and melt at my different field sites. Since snow shields the ground from harsh winter air temperatures, both the timing and magnitude of snowpack are important factors in determining summer active layer conditions.

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.

Sunday Hikes

Sundays are typically my one day off during the week.  To me, it seems like a waste to hang around camp  and sleep, so for the past two Sundays I've gone on hikes in and around the Brooks Range.  The first hike was to see some local aufeis before the seasons changed.  I went with Melissa, the kickass PolarTREC teacher who is on our research team for the first part of the summer.  For the second hike, I joined a bigger group headed to Atigun Falls, located just inside Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Cartwheeling towards the aufeis.

Mountain stream

On the ice

:3

The Dalton Highway is under construction so we had plenty of time to stare at the pipeline while waiting for the pilot car.

Atigun River crossing 2, where we left our trucks behind for the Atigun Falls hike.

The spooky Molar Mountain

Gorgeous glacially carved valley, with a skin of arctic tundra plant communities.

Marine stratigraphy

View of the falls from our lunch spot.

Mostly frozen this time of year.

Hiking back out to the valley.

The group.  Photo taken by Lisle Snyder.

Constructing Science

Over the last week, I've picked up a few skills I didn't expect to learn while out studying water flow paths in the Arctic.  I've spent much of my time constructing platforms for solar panels that power the electronic instruments we are deploying at our six field sites, as well as wiring and programming the electronics themselves.  Here are some of the steps involved:

Hauling scrap wood from the burn pile by the bonfire area.
Here, you can also see Toolik Lake still frozen, but the hillsides in the background are beginning to melt.

I learned to use a circular saw AND a table saw.

For my side of the project, the dataloggers (see four pictures down) are part of a thermocouple system, in which signals are sent down one wire to a temperature sensor, then come up a second wire with different material properties.  The signal is recorded by the datalogger and relates to temperature.  We have sensors at incremental depths underground in three wells, one inside the water track, one on the water track edge, and one outside the water track, at each of our six sites.  In this way, we can monitor how the temperature changes as the permafrost melt depth increases over the summer, and then freezes into the winter, re-thaws in the summer, etc.

I drilled a hole through a cooler to pull the wires that connect to the wells through.  The cooler houses the datalogger instrumentation and the battery, protecting them from snow and rain.

I had to strip all thirty wire pairs.  The wire is similar to thermostat wire.

Here's what I looked like for three hours.

Then I connected all the wires to the dataloggers.

Finally I hooked up the battery and the solar panel that will power it except through the sunless winter.  Hopefully it is working and recording data!  I'll go back and check soon.