02 June 2004

Joined: 23 Mar 2004 Posts: 84

June 2, 2004

Boy oh boy, it was cold today. We did our regular sampling session in the morning, and I wasn’t so lucky today because I had to get my hands wet. We knew it was really cold out when the water on the outside of our sampling bottle froze before we were even done filtering it and putting it into the smaller bottles. I think what made it so cold was the wind that was coming down right from the North Pole, and it doesn’t have far to go to reach us here. The sampling session went pretty normally, without much incident.

After lunch, we did a dry run of the sampling procedure that we are going to follow when we are on the boat. There is a really well thought out and written out procedure for us to follow when we are on the boat. Part of the procedure includes having a “clean hands” person and a “dirty hands” person. What this means is that the clean hands person is the one that will have gloves on and will be the only one to handle the samples. The dirty hands person will handle the equipment to get the water samples but will not actually come into contact with the samples at all.

Going through the procedure was a really important step because when we are one the boat we are going to be making a makeshift laboratory so that we can do some of the initial analysis of the samples right there. One of the tests that we are going to do in the make shift lab is pH and temperature. pH is really a measure of how acidic or basic the water is. There are lots of different ways to measure pH from using a capsule in water and seeing what color the water turns, to using litmus paper which will turn different colors depending on the pH to a fancy meter like the one that we are going to be using which will give us pH to the hundredths place. That is much more accurate than the other types of pH tests are. So we made sure that our pH meter was calibrated and reading different solutions correctly.

Tonight for dinner we were invited to the principal’s house. She prepared a great meal of regional foods which included reindeer tongue (I’m not kidding) and dried smoked fish. They also have really yummy bread here. While we were at dinner, we spoke about life as a teacher in the US to life as a teacher in Russia. Like everything else there are a lot of things that are similar between our school systems and some things that are very different.

After dinner, we got to see a traditional Evenki house which is one of the indigenous peoples from around this area. What I found particularly interesting was the built in refrigerator/freezer. Because this area is in permafrost, if you dig down two meters you end up in year around frozen land. What a great place to put a freezer! That is what this is:

The principal’s house was located right on the bank of the river, so after dinner we went and looked at the river. The lighting was really great to see reflections (it was probably about 11:00 p.m.)

One sort of funny story is that the way tradition is here, you always have one more cup of tea before you leave someone’s house. The two times that we have been to someone’s house for a meal, they serve an incredible amount of food for the meal and then when you go back to have the last cup of tea, there is a whole new spread of food, pretty much another whole dinner. So, we really ate two dinners there last night!

Check out the latest comparison photos of the Lena River shoreline:

http://archive.arcus.org/TREC/lena_river_shoreline.html