31 May 2004 & 01 June 2004

Joined: 23 Mar 2004 Posts: 84

May 31, 2004

Weather: Sunny in the morning, Cloudy and Windy in the Afternoon

Temperature: 7 ° C 46°F

Precipitation: Yes

Form: Rain

How Much: Trace

June 1, 2004

Weather: Cloudy, Cold, and Windy

Temp: -2°C 28°F

Precipitation: Yes

Form: Snow

How Much: Trace

The last two days have followed basically the same routine. We get up in the morning, have breakfast, and then pack up and head down to the river. It takes us about 20 minutes to get there and then we set up to do our sampling. Besides actually scooping the water out of the river and carefully putting it into bottles, we also have to document everything that we are doing, why we are doing it, anything that may happen while we are sampling that may affect the samples, and the conditions that existed while we were sampling. It took me a couple of days of looking over the “real” scientists’ shoulders to get an idea of how to do this, but here is an example of what went in the lab notebook on May 31, 2004:

WATER SAMPLE DATA—MAY 31, 2004, LENA RIVER, ZHIGANSK

Air Temperature: 4°C

Time: 9:43

The ice on the river broke up yesterday afternoon. Yesterday, throughout the afternoon and night a current of broken chunks of ice flowed swiftly and steadily in the center of the river. Broken plates of ice stayed fixed or moved slowly near the bank. The water level has risen significantly.

When we returned this morning, ice was still flowing in the center of the river, but the flow wasn’t packed as densely with ice chunks as it was yesterday.

We collected water from a patch of open water surrounded by stationary ice near the shore. The water current at times at this spot appeared to be nearly zero, although there were surges and/ or possibly wind currents that caused the ice chunks to move back and fourth as much as 20 meters. The temperature of the water was 0.3°C.

A sample was taken about 15 feet from shore using a pole and Teflon bottle by Max.

The first sample (labeled 4A) was rinsed one extra time because it wasn’t filled to the top and taped appropriately. One of the trace metals samples was processed using a 0.45 µm filter. Another sample was processed using a 0.45/0.02 µm filter stack. After approximately 25 ml of water had passed through the filters, the 0.45 µm filter ruptured due to excess pressure. Only a small amount of water had been collected into the vial so it was discarded. The filters, however, were retained. A second sample was collected for Trace Metals.

Here is a picture of me and the Laboratory Notebook

Here is a picture from our sampling today. If we all look cold in this picture it is because we are freezing! However, science must go on—even if it is really cold (I was lucky because I didn’t have to handle any of the water today, so my hands didn’t get wet!!!)

This afternoon we went back to the school to get a tour by the principal and to talk more about some of the inter-school relationships that the PARTNERS team would like to build. We are going to her house for dinner tomorrow night to discuss this more.

The other routine part of our day is transmitting these journals and pictures via satellite phone and answering any questions that are posted to the web site (keep them coming!). We often do it from the lodge, but the coolest spot where we’ve set up the satellite communications had to be at our riverside sampling location.

Finally, here is our web page showing how the river has changed over the last five days—we have heard that it won’t reach its highest level until next Tuesday, but we were also told that the weather gets nice after the river breaks, but so far that isn’t proving to be true—so we’ll have to see.

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