Field Course Report: 2008

The inaugural Polaris Project field course was a remarkable experience for all involved.  After many months of planning, the trip began on July 5 when all US participants met at New York’s JFK airport after traveling from various points of origin around the country.  Most of the students and even some of the PIs had never met before, so the combined student/PI group first came together at JFK. 

Our overnight flight to Moscow arrived on schedule at noon on July 6, and a small bus was waiting to take us to our “hotel”.  Actually, we stayed in what we began referring to as a “hotel-like structure”, because the building typically housed teachers participating in workshops and courses, but we were the only people there in early July.  The benefit for the Polaris Project was primarily cost – approximately $40 per person per night, as opposed to closer to $150-200 per night for even a “cheap” hotel in Moscow.  The arrangements for this “hotel” were made possible through connections of Ekaterina Bulygina, now a Research Assistant at the Woods Hole Research Center but previously a Moscow resident (and still a Russian citizen).  This was one of many times that arrangements were made that would have been impossible without Ekaterina.  In any case, we did a bit of sightseeing in Moscow on the evening of our arrival (Red Square and the Kremlin), got some sleep, and spent the next day meeting with students, discussing goals and project ideas, and generally getting to know each other.

The only negative event during the initial part of the trips was that one of the students became ill (it turns out she had been fighting an infection for several days and it got worse while traveling), and after much deliberation, we decided it would be unwise for her to continue and travel farther away from top quality medical care.  Thus, she had to return to the United States.  Everyone was very disappointed, but all also understood the decision had to be made.

After spending the day at the “hotel”, we again boarded our small bus and went to another Moscow airport, where we boarded yet another overnight flight, this time to Yakutsk.  For the participants coming for the West Coast of the U.S., this was the third overnight flight in four days!  In any case, we made it to Yakutsk at 6 am local time and were met by Valentin Spektor (Co-PI for Yakut State University and the Melnikov Permafrost Institute) and Anya Suslova (Polaris Project student from Yakut State University).  Over the next two days we had a tour of the Melnikov Permafrost Institute – including it 15-meter deep tunnel through permafrost – saw various sites around the city of Yakutsk (population about 200,000 – mostly ethnically Yakut), and continued discussions of what we’d do when we finally got to Cherskiy.

On July 9, we boarded our final outbound flight and traveled from Yakutsk to Cherskiy.  Upon arrival at Cherskiy, we were then 16 times zones to the east of the US East Coast, and 20 times zones from Alaska (where Katie Walter originated her travel).  The flight to Cherskiy, aboard an aging turboprop plane, was spectacular.  The skies were clear and students and PIs marveled at the magnificent landscape below.  As Kate Willis, Polaris Project student from Clark University, wrote in a recent graduate school application essay “As our prop plane glided over the Siberian floodplain, scientists ranging from published PhD’s to undergraduate students crowded the windows to look at the lakes below.  Questions were asked, such as “Why is that lake turquoise, and the lake directly adjacent brown?”  Theories were proposed and discussed in depth, and ideas as to how to test the hypotheses were considered.  This was the scientific method in action.  I was thrilled to be a part of this intelligent geographic field research team.  It was then I really know I had made the right decision to pursue a career in geographic field research”.

We were met at the Cherskiy airport by Sergey Zimov, a remarkable scientist and director of the Northeast Science Station where our field course was based.  The station consists of three houses that are occupied by the year-around staff of the Northeast Science Station (Sergey and Gallina Zimov, Sergey and Anna Davidov, and Nikita and Anastasiya Zimov), two laboratory buildings, a variety of boats and 4-wheel drive vehicles, and the barge which was the home base for the Polaris Project group.  A tremendous benefit of living on the barge was that it was mobile – we covered hundreds of kilometers along the Kolyma River, sometimes during multi-day excursions, by towing the barge.

Because many of the PIs had not previously been to Russia, and only two had been to the Northeast Science Station, our expectations for the Year 1 field course were rather modest.  We wanted to get everyone to and from Siberia safely, to survey the region around Cherskiy so that subsequent field courses could be planned in much greater detail, and perhaps to do some mini projects so that the first year students would have some hands-on experience doing arctic research.  In fact, the reality much exceeded these expectations.  Not only did we experience a great variety of biomes and survey a remarkably large swath of the Kolma region, but we also were able to initiate several significant research projects.  These initial efforts resulted in two student-led presentations at the December 2008 meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.  In addition to the field activities, a series of “barge lectures” were given by project PIs about their research interests.  Though these lectures were impromptu, they were a big hit – in subsequent years, all PIs will give research presentations during the first week of the course.

After two weeks at the Northeast Science Station (in subsequent years will spend 3.5 weeks in Cherskiy), we bid farewell to the station staff and began our long travel home.  We again had 2 nights in Yakutsk and then 3 nights in Moscow.  In future years we will compress these travel days, though we hesitate to eliminate the extra days entirely because they provide valuable cushion in case flights are delayed or cancelled.  In any case, we made it back to JFK airport as a group and then said our good-byes as we split to complete our travel to various points of origin.