Today was a day full of work -- no real time of boredom, which I am glad for. I woke up, got some breakfast, and went to the dry-lab to get some work done. Apparently, Mr. Buckley was all ready to get his digital pictures sent, along with installments of our journals. In order to this, I had to help him convert all of the .kdc files (Kodak Digital Camera format) to jpeg that could be used on NSF's webpage.
After
that, I did some salinity sampling over a core that Terry and Bill had
cut up. Lunch came and went, and afterwards Terry, Mr. Buckley, and I
got into our mustangs and hopped in the helicopter to take some cores
and ice-mud samples while the boat was slowly trying to make its way through
the surprisingly thick ice. I am becoming more comfortable with helicopter
procedures now. They are pretty orderly and quick. You have to be very
aware of everything going on, because the sound of the props is deafening,
and you rely mostly on hand-signals until you are all belted in and can
plug into the mica jack.
We took off, and landed in a spot nestled among a large series of
melt ponds. We dug a few cores, but didn't find anything that exciting
in them. Terry put them directly into the core tubes rather than cutting
them up -- wanting to use them for structure rather than any chemical
analysis. After we dug the cores, we poked around a little for mud, each
collecting a jar, and then headed back onto the chopper to search for
a different site (preferably with more mud). We were getting quite hot
in our mustangs, and took our gloves and hat off. It was a swell day here
in the arctic.
We reached the next site, and it was very nice. We found great algae and sediment in one of the cores we pulled, and found an amazing amount of mud on the ice. Other interesting things that we found were an array of different-sized bivalves, and I discovered a spider crawling on my sediment bottle. I suppose it came with me out to the ice, which I stowed away in my jacket to keep warm and cozy.
We then headed out in the chopper very satisfied with the mysterious clam-shells that keep popping up on the ice. When we got back, we came in during the last part of the e-mail meeting, which Mr. Buckley showed a lot of dissatisfaction in. I personally would rather have no communication at all than such an unreliable e-mail system as this.
So the issue of sending the journals and pics commenced, and Mr. Buckley became even more discontent with the lack of ease required to use this system. I agree with him -- scientist dealing with important data, with enough on their minds shouldn't have to spend a good part of two hours getting a simple piece of e-mail sent. After that process was finished, we made our way to get the filter samples in the vials, and test them for chlorophyll. Basically, you have to insert an amount of the acetone from its vial into a little test tube, which you then insert into a contraption which sends a beam of energy through it. Depending on how much chlorophyll you have, you may either have to send more light through (for lesser concentrations), or dilute the solution (for greater concentrations) in order to get a reading within a certain range.
After that, I went and got a good workout to return here and start writing my journal.