I am dead tired right now. In the morning, I woke up after a good night's
rest, and took a shower. I made my way up to the dry-lab, and sat there
for a minute. A second later, the helicopter crew chief came in, and asked
Mr. Buckley if he wanted to go to Barrow again. Mr.
Buckley said yes, of course. He knows his way around Barrow, and is much
more efficient at obtaining things than anyone else they'd send there.
So, with no other choice, he left me with all of the work on the ice-cores
that we had taken the day before. There was one whole ice core, about
110 cm long, three other 20 cm bottom sections, and a bottle of water
from the hole that one of the cores came out of. I had to take nutrient
and chemical samples of them all, store all of those in the deep-freeze
cooler in the storage area; and then take salinities. After I took the
salinities, which were relatively low, I filtered them all for algae and
sediment. I found a lot of nice algae, and virtually no sediment. We had
hit a very clean area. I was glad for this, since yesterday I got thirsty
and stuffed a little snow in my mouth, hoping no one would notice.
I had prepared all of the viles; labeled, and filled with 10 mL of acetone. I stuck the filter papers in there, and stored them in the fridge in the wet-lab. The entire process had taken me from 1300 to 1915, without any rest period. That is probably pitiful compared to what a professional does, but for me it was kind of mental overload. I had just been introduced to these processes, and to do all of them on my own was kind of overwhelming. It worked though, and I took it one step at a time. Nothing went wrong, so I am very pleased. I am truly glad I didn't have to do any fluorometer work, though. That is just too brain-intensive. It is too easy to miss a little step that will greatly effect your results, and there are too many variables that come into play in preparing the solution for a decent fluorometer reading.
Finally, after all of that (which was very interesting -- arduous, but definitely not boring), I went to the science lectures, that were very intriguing. It started off with Lance talking about his organization (National Underwater Research Program), based in Wilmington, North Carolina. He talked about the ROV's, and all of the other interesting underwater machines that they had built. An article was done in National Geographic about one of their machines, and a picture that Lance took was included. I then realized how high caliber the people I am working with are.
After Lance, Lisa presented on her work. She basically talked about how important the ice algae are to the underwater ecosystem, being producers that many animals rely on for a food source. She got into some pretty technical aspects of it, and it was pretty incredible. She is a biology professor, and a pretty dynamic one. She made the talk very interesting.
After Lisa came Will. Will elaborated on a lot of what Lisa and Lance had to say, and then talked about the relationship of algae to his underwater creatures, and studying the algae with the ROV. Their presentations were very well coordinated with each other. They were almost seamless, each one elaborating on the last, and bringing it into a territory more relevant to what they were studying. I was impressed.
The presentations being over, I made my way to the dry lab, and ate some M&M's that Terry had requested Mr. Buckley bring back from Barrow. They were very good. I was a little disappointed in that Mr. Buckley hadn't been able to get a hold of my mom, because I wanted to see if I had gotten any important mail while I was gone. It isn't that important, but mail is always a nice thing to have on this little jaunt. Something to think about, when you are staring out at the vast expanse of ice.