30 May 2004 - Ice Has Broken!

Joined: 23 Mar 2004 Posts: 84

May 30, 2004

Weather: Cloudy in the morning, sunny in the afternoon

Sunrise: 1:21 a.m.

Sunset: 12: 02 p.m.

# of daylight hours: 22 hours 25 minutes

High Temp: 11 °C 54°F

Low Temp: 0°C 32°F

Average Temp: 6°C 28°F

Precipitation: NO

Form:

How Much:

The ice broke this afternoon. It was one of the neatest things to go down to the river which has been so still since we have been here and see it not only flowing quickly but flowing with huge chunks of ice. I would have loved to have jumped on one of the them and traveled down the river. There were so many big chunks of ice all crammed up onto each other, and then when you looked at each one close up there were all these patterns and neat formations.

It was also fun to see the awesome force of ice. Look at this picture of the sand that these relatively small chunks of ice moved and then think of the power of a huge glacier. If you go to the Activities and Experiments section of the webpage, you can find an activity that will show a simulation of the ice event we saw on the Lena today.

When the ice broke, it also caused a huge surge of water up the beach. If you look at the pictures on the web page below, you will be able to see the change on the same shoreline over the last four days! (Hint: Look for the truck tracks in the sands and see how the water gets closer and closer to them – and finally covers them)

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

This morning, we repeated the same tests that we have done the last few mornings. We got samples to measure the Oxygen Isotopes and concentrations of Nutrients, Dissolved Organic Carbon, Major Ions, and Trace Metals (see Teacher’s Journal titled Water Sampling for descriptions of each of them.

We then spent quite a bit of time at the ship, which has moved from the main river to a tributary so that it wouldn’t get crushed by the ice when it broke. When we do the main PARTNERS Project sampling from the boat (after the ice clears), we will be using a depth integrating sampler, which has to be slowly released with a winch system.

We are trying to install the winch onto the boat so that it is ready to go when we do our samples from the boat. So far it looks like it is going to work really well.

When we were on our way back to the lodge, we saw a lot of kids in the road with some music playing and so we thought we would check it out. Well it was all the elementary school students getting ready to do a run around the block for health and the principal asked if we wanted to join. There are not many times that you get to join a bunch of kids running for health in Siberia, so we joined them, with all of our jackets and rubber boots on—and it was fun. Although, I have to admit I was breathing pretty hard at the end!!!

The kids here are adorable and all seem as happy as can be.

We all went to Agatha’s house (see Teacher’s Journal—Great Story from Zhigansk) this afternoon to talk to some of her students about our lives and our science research project. It was great because these students were very interested in learning about global warming and the PARTNERS project. They didn’t know much about the changes that could happen to the Arctic if some of the models of global climate change for the next 100 years end up being true.