Working on the lakes and streams Options

[Robert_Oddo]

Today we broke up in three groups to begin our investigations of the lake and the river entering the lake. We got up to the lake early. It started out being a beautiful day, bright and sunny and around 40 degrees. Two groups went out on our two zodiacs and started work on profiling the lake. They were looking at turbidity (how cloudy the lake is), conductivity, pH and temperature at various points on the lake. This is important if we are going to look at how and where the sediments are deposited. Another group, the group I was with went up the stream a way and measured the flow rate, the discharge rate of the river and did some sediment grabs. It important to know how much water is entering the lake and the amount of sediment is being carried on a fairly regular basis. All this information is needed if we are going to understand how each layer in these sediment cores I talked about in earlier posts is being formed. In addition our group started mapping out the river using a GPS unit. We were interested in mapping all the tributaries that enter the river. Each of these is probably contributing some sediment to the river.

We got back to camp around 6:30pm, sweaty and pretty tired from a hard day of work. The weather changed during the day, the wind kicked up and it got foggy and cool. So much for our heat wave. Even thought we are in a real remote area, we are lucky to be working in a field station such as Isfjord Radio. We have great meals, with great cooks. There is coffee and tea available all the time, there are drying rooms for our wet gear, and there are large areas to do our work and store our gear. Our evenings are spent in a large room filled with computers and all kinds of technological gear. Here we crunch our data and discuss some of our results. More on this later.


Emily taking a sediment grab