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At the start of the season, we are trying to assess the season as quick as possible. Which goose is nesting where, and how many eggs are in the nest.
During a visit on the island Storholmen in the Kings Bay at Spitsbergen, I came across this old lady. I ringed this goose green PA in 1991, when she was already an adult.
She knows the drill as well as I do and does not want to spend much energy on resistance. I lift her up, read the ring and count the eggs. At other arctic sites, there seems to be a lot of snow and incubation has been delayed. In my study area, despite the large amount of snow, nesting sites were available and nesting started at about a similar time as last year. Clutch size is low with an average of 3.6 goose eggs per nest after the first checks. Glaucous gull...
Wednesday, 25 June 2008 04:20
Day 64: Impacts of 50 years of climate change on the terminus
Written by Matt Nolan
Today I was up at 5:30AM to try to complete the work I attempted yesterday. Jason and Joey were up earlier, getting ready to complete the drilling they started yesterday too. After shuttling them up to the upper cirque, I headed down the terminus with a load of science gear and food, trying to take advantage of the crystal clear skies for my 50 year repeat photo of the terminus. The clear night had hardened the snow, but also made the ice surface slick. So slick in fact that I had to drop off the sled before the last hill because the ice provided no traction for the sled and made it tend to try to get in front of the snow machine. On the way to the photo site I took a few quick panoramas of the stream and aufeis, while the terminus was still in the shade of the early morning. I had forgott...
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Tuesday, 24 June 2008 23:55
Matt Nolan's multimedia missives from McCall continue...
Written by Stefan Geens
From April to September 2008, University of Alaska Fairbanks researcher Matt Nolan is living on McCall Glacier in Northern Alaska with his wife, son and fellow researchers, subjecting the glacier to a battery of tests... and blogging the process.
Because McCall Glacier is so remote, he’s only able to send his blog entries by plane every few weeks or so. We’ve just received — and posted — the most recent batch. You can access all of Matt’s posts via this link.
What makes Matt’s posts so interesting is that he uses an assortment of multimedia tools to get his message across. Not “just” text and photos, but also video (posted to YouTube and embedded here on IPY.org)...
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Dear Rhian and IPY,
I am writing in order to let you know about the most recent IPY Day in Brazil (18/06). I work at two different schools in Brazil: Colégio Neruda, in Araraquara, SP, and Colégio Puríssimo Coração de Maria, in Rio Claro, SP.
At Colégio Neruda, after we discussed the importance of the Poles and climate change, the students made posters to express their impressions and concerns about those matters. We will send some of the posters to students in other countries, with whom they will exchange opi...
On our return from the terminus, the clock began ticking once again with deadlines. Kristin, Turner and I need to be in Kaktovik by July 1, and a lot of preparations are needed before we leave: we have to pack for a week at the terminus doing stream work, a several day hike to our airstrip on the tundra, for two weeks in Kaktovik, for a one week trip to Colorado after that, for a hike back in to the glacier in late July, and for another month or so on the glacier. Because we are avoiding helicopter use, anything we have here that we need on any of these trips we must now hike out with. Plus we need a good inventory of what’s here so we know what else we need to bring back with us, especially in terms of food. For example, I need a computer in Kaktovik plus all of my files, so I need to p...
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Monday, 23 June 2008 22:31
Black Carbon: Playing a Major Role in Arctic Climate Change
Written by International Polar Foundation
Sooty particles emitted during the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels (petroleum, coal), biofuels, and biomass (wood, animal dung, etc.) can do more than just create unsightly pollution and provoke respiratory problems. Known within the scientific community as black carbon, research and modelling conducted in recent years shows that this dark-coloured aerosol has been playing a significant role in climate warming through its absorption of solar radiation. Its impact is heaviest in the cryosphere, where its presence can reduce snow albedo and can lead to faster melting of snow on land and on sea ice.
...
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At the start of the season, we are trying to assess the season as quick as possible. Which goose is nesting where, and how many eggs are in the nest.
During a visit on the island Storholmen in the Kings Bay at Spitsbergen, I came across this old lady. I ringed this goose green PA in 1991, when she was already an adult.
She knows the drill as well as I do and does not want to spend much energy on resistance. I lift her up, read the ring and count the eggs. At other arctic sites, there seems to be a lot of snow and incubation has been delayed. In my study area, despite the large amount of snow, nesting sites were available and nesting started at about a similar time as last year. Clutch size is low with an average of 3.6 goose eggs per nest after the first checks. Glaucous gull...
We left the terminus today having succeeded with most of what we wanted to accomplish there. This morning we tested out the fluorometer, a device that ingests samples of water and tells you whether there is any dye in it before spitting it out again. The dye in this case is a glorified food coloring that we drop in by the teaspoon; it’s too diluted in the stream to see it, so the machine tells us whether its there or not. The idea is to put some in the stream on the glacier (that had the slush flow a few days earlier) before it disappears into a hole in the ice and see how long it takes to travel to outlet stream at the terminus where we are now. If it takes a short time, chances are there is a well developed conduit system beneath the glacier – basically a river. But if it takes a lon...
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The Arctic field season is now in full flow.. IPY researchers are busy in Northern Canada, Alaska, Greenland, Russia, Scandinavia, and the Arctic Ocean. They are also, like their Antarctic colleagues, committed to public outreach. So where are the stories? Well.. they're just starting to come in, as the researchers return to a more-connected world.
This image shows BAS personnel Crispin Day (left), Richard Hindmarsh (centre) and Fabien Gillet (right) who went to NSF Summit Station in Greenland to deploy the BAS phase-sensitive radar (pRES). This measures deformation in ice, and the team will exploit a glaciological phenomenon known as the "Raymond Effect" to achieve a high-accuracy determination of the viscosity (stickiness) of ice. Knowledge of this is essential in predi...