Midnight Sun

Happy Solstice Everyone!

The clouds here in the summertime are pretty fantastic. The best part is it is never too dark to see 'em!

Mamma moose and some twins running in the Savage River in late May. You can tell it has taken me a while to post this photo (sorry folks!) because these days all the vegetation along the Savage is green.

My co-worker and fellow grad student Elizabeth fording the Sanctuary River during a backpacking trip we took last month.  Who needs dry socks?

The CiPEHR experiment on a particularly foggy morning. The solar panels usually generate enough power to keep the autochamber system running 24 hours a day. When we have a few cloudy days in a row, however, it is often necessary to give the batteries a hand with gas powered generators.

When a CO2 flux is being measured the doors on the top of the autochamber close and the gas from inside is pumped through the blue tubes to an infrared gas analyzer. These fluxes are taken at all hours of the day and averaged over time to tell us about overall  carbon balance of the ecosystem.

These are some anion and cation binding resins bags that I am installing in the CiPEHR plots as a way to look at the availability of inorganic nitrogen in the soil.

Chunk o'tundra I brought back to the lab. Sometime this year I want to try and decorate a chocolate cake to look like this... any co-chefs interested in participating?

Mt. Healy! I wish I could say this was the summit, but we didn't quite make it all the way to the top on this hike. A lazy morning and evening plans for a BBQ cut our journey short. Clearly too many fun things to do on our day off!

View from almost-the-top-of-Mt. Healy

Dryas octopetala flowering in Denali National Park

Marmot! This lil guy was enjoying a nap in the sun when we found him. He was perturbed, as you can probably tell from his expression.

Getting some deep soil cores with the gas powered auger. I can't believe how lucky... I get to do stuff like this and call it WORK!

Photo credit Dr. Sue Natali

I love my permafrost!

Photo credit Dr. Sue Natali

This is a section of the AK pipeline near Fairbanks. According to the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company's website, in 1988 the pipeline pumped an average of 2,033,082 barrels a day. In 2011 its average throughput was only 582,895 barrels per day.

Two weeks ago I got to go on a tour of the US Army Corps of Engineer's permafrost tunnel in Fairbanks. This tunnel was dug from 1963-1969 and is used as a research site for all sorts of permafrost research. The tunnel is not open to the general public but there is a neat virtual tour available here: http://permafrosttunnel.crrel.usace.army.mil/overview/virtual_tunnel_tour.html.  

This is the view as you enter the tunnel. The ceiling is lined with dangling frozen plant roots. At the end of the tunnel (110 m long, 15m below the surface) the permafrost is 40,000 years old.

Ice lenses, small and large! The cylindrical holes are from where samples have been take in the past. The permafrost below the large, horizontal ice lens is lined with what looks like scratch marks: these are actually lots of tiny "reticulate-chaotic" ice lenses. They form in areas where the permafrost has thawed and refrozen while surrounded by continually frozen permafrost

The ice wedge I am illuminating was formed when a crack developed in the soil during the normal seasonal freeze-thaw cycle. This crack was progressively widened as water entered the crack, froze and expanded. There is a nice diagram describing this process here: http://permafrosttunnel.crrel.usace.army.mil/permafrost/massive_ice.html

Different depositional layers in the permafrost

This wheelbarrow and some pretty cool icy stalagmites were located near the entrance of the tunnel. Sadly it was too cold in the tunnel to stay long!

This week I installed some cores that will help me estimate rates of nitrogen mineralization. This core is ready to be incubated for the season underneath a nice mossy blanket.

Though I can't brew beer up here in AK I still have time to play with some yeasty beasties. This loaf of bread came out looking particularly tasty!

Greetings!

Thanks for checking out my blog. I will be updating it periodically this summer to keep friends and family informed on my life and research in Healy, AK. 

 I left my home in Gainesville, FL a little over a week ago and now find myself living in a small cabin in interior Alaska. My graduate advisor Dr. Ted Schuur has a manipulative experiment just down the road from the cabin by Eight Mile Lake. This experiment began warming small portions of the tundra in 2008 to emulate the impact climate change will have on arctic ecosystems. In the winter, soil temperatures are elevated by means of an added layer of snow insulates the ground. During the summer, small plexiglass greenhouses are used to passively warm plants.

Currently, our lab’s research focuses on the carbon balance between plants, soils, and the atmosphere. At the warming experiment a complex system of automated chambers and gas analyzers measure the rates of photosynthesis and respiration at all hours of the day. My role in this project is just beginning because this is my first field season as graduate student in the lab. Over the next few years I will be putting a lot of my energy into investigating how warming changes nitrogen cycling in tundra ecosystems. Nitrogen limits plant productivity in arctic ecosystems because low temperatures restrict decomposition (and nitrogen recycling) rates. I am excited because this opportunity combines two things I love: playing in the dirt and biogeochemistry!

Enough of the background information already, you really came here to see some cool pictures, right?

Well, here ya go. If you'd like to see larger versions of the pictures, just click on them.

These caribou were meandering by our field site last week when I headed out for my first day of field work. Did you know that there are about 4 million caribou in North America?

Denali National Park  is located about 10 miles south of Healy. On Sunday, some of my lab mates and I took a drive into the park and saw some beautiful mountains (as well as moose, caribou, and some cold tourists). 

A Goldeneye Duck we saw paddling in a half thawed pond near Teklanika River

A Willow Ptarmigan at the field site. This guy is halfway between his summer and winter plumage but still does a pretty good job of camouflaging himself!

Almost leaf out! Many of the trees here are still just waking up for the growing season. My last few summers in AK have been spent north of the treeline so I am enjoying having leaf buds overhead.

Green understory plants

The mosses are definitely more awake (and ready to reproduce) than the trees

 Symbionts! The abundance of lichen is one of my favorite things about the tundra.

Sphagnum moss

It is not quite the dog days of summer, but the sled dogs that live by our cabin are definitely in vacation mode now that all the snow has melted. 

My nook of the cabin! This is where I sit to do all my data entry, supply ordering, email writing, etc. The timestamp for this picture is around 11 pm... check out how light it still is outside!

This is a tent in the woods by our cabin that will be functioning as my lab space for the next few months. Not having running water is definitely a challenge when doing lab work, but I think I will survive. Luckily I can drive to Fairbanks every so often to make use of the Bonanza Creek LTER (Long Term Ecological Research) laboratory.

Today I went out took some frozen soil cores. Once the soil thaws I will begin separating out the live roots from dead organic matter. I plan to repeat this a a few times during the growing season to get a feel for the rooting depth of plants at our site. Understanding what belowground resources plants have access to is important when considering their growth and allocation patterns.

That is all I have for now, folks. Check back soon!

Farewell and Thanks

Awesome river goo growing at Toolik Lake Outlet. A crew of us wandered around here and went for a swim on my last day off.

Wanna ride? This lil guy looks like he's been rusting out on the tundra for a while now.

This year the terrestrial folks at Toolik Lake performed a HUGE biomass harvest out at the Anaktuvuk River Burn. Soils, litter, organic matter, and plants were all collected in 10cm x 20cm quadrats along various transects within the footprint of the fire. Once harvested, the material in these quadrats was to be sorted into about a hundred different categories. "Plucking" apart the tundra like this requires man-power, patience and a sense of humor.

Us pluckers hard at work. Our lab looked like this for the better part of week, 12+ hours a day. Topics of conversation included moss identification, clarifying the difference between attached and unattached pre and post fire litter, research interests, musical likes and dislikes, and what substance you would most like to jump into a swimming pool of. Eventually, though, most conversations centered around one question: How the hell did we all end up here in a trailer tweezing apart moss for hours on end?
The wonderful folks around this table where what made the tedious work possible and it was a pleasure to get to know them better. The only downside of participating in this pluck is that I occasionally catch myself sorting my salad greens by species.

Before Plucking

After Plucking
The categories this bit of tundra was sorted into include Eriophorum green blades, attached post fire litter, attached pre fire litter, Eriophorum rhizomes, live green moss, and Eriophorum sheaths (listed clockwise from top-right).

Burn, baby, Burn!
Just some of the soil that was carefully sorted through for roots and rhizomes.

Post pluck, time to sit on the back deck and drink a beer. Don't forget the Deet!

On my last day of fieldwork I flew out to the Burn Site to make a series of chamber measurements. These are some pictures of fog that was rolling around a valley we flew over. Pretty breathtaking!

~Adios~

This week I left Toolik Lake and began my journey south. I am currently in Woods Hole, MA but come Wednesday I will be hopping in my car and moving Gainesville, Florida. Next summer I will be returning to AK to begin work on my graduate research. Check back for more pictures then!

Thanks to everyone at Toolik who made it an incredibly fun and productive home for my last two summers. I will try to sneak my way back whenever possible!