June 28: The longest drive

Posted: Thu Jul 01, 2004 3:48 am

This morning, we finished packing, did the final chores around the lab, appropriately disposed of our waste, and bid farewell to Toolik Lake.

Almost immediately upon leaving, we ran into a wall of smoke almost 400-mile thick; we saw clear skies for only a small portion of our trip from Toolik Lake to Fairbanks.

Fairbanks is enveloped in a cloud of smoke and haze from the burning tundra miles away. It smells like someone lit a fire, but forgot to open the flue to the chimney… (How Santa will get down, I don’t know.) Isolated at the Toolik Yacht and Country Club, it’s been easy to ignore news from the outside world.

It’s a homemade sailboat… built entirely from spare lumber. The woodworkers at Toolik are ingenuous craftsmen.

The smoke was at times so intense that ash was dropping into the windows of the car and the sun changed from brilliant white to red. The fires must be HUGE!

Editor’s note: I heard on the news that the smoke covers an area the size of Texas.

Interesting Facts to Make You Smarter
Sunlight is NOT yellow; it is ALL colors. If you place a prism or crystal in the sunlight, the light that comes out of the other side of the prism is the full spectrum of colors… If only yellow light went into the crystal, only yellow light would come out. Try it!

When the sun is straight overhead, most of the sun’s light reaches the surface of the Earth. However, some colors are scattered by bouncing off particles in the atmosphere. The color which gets scattered the best? Blue… thus blue skies. (The chemistry and physics behind scattering colors is astounding and surprising…. If the molecules in the atmosphere were a slightly different size, we’d have different color skies or no-color skies… Imagine a night sky with the sun floating around in it!) When the Earth turns, and the sun’s light has to travel through more and more of the atmosphere to reach your eyeballs, more and more of the sun’s light is scattered by the atmosphere. So while only blue light is scattered when the sun is overhead, as the light travels through more atmosphere, pretty soon, only red light is left. What color does the sun appear before it sets? Red, the same color as a sun through gobs of smoke!