After breakfast, everyone split into 3 different groups – one went up the Pantaleja River to explore a stream and collect water samples, another went to nearby Shuchi Lake to set gas traps, and our group went to Grass Alas to collect tree cores from a transect of this drained lake basin. Typically in this part of Siberia, many of the lakes that are actively thermokarsting will drain catastrophically, creating unique landscape heterogeneity. Thermokarsting is the process of rapid thaws of permafrost along a shoreline of a lake resulting in a shift of the lake’s location and ending in a rapid drainage. This process can take several years.

By coring a transect of the alas, we hope to approximate the drain date. In addition, we have a wood sample from the site prior to lake formation to determine not only drain date but also the lake formation date to outline the lifespan of this process. By lunch time, we had cored 9 trees, with the help of Nikita Zimov and Anya Falina.

Our ultimate goal is to sample tree cores of several different alas’s along with some soil core data (if possible and available) and apply the process at a landscape scale. We’d like to incorporate a spatial variable into the project using satellite imagery to make inferences about this drainage process across Arctic watersheds and the role it plays in succession, turnover, and regeneration.

After returning from our coring adventure, Sudeep’s fish arrived. He had coordinated with a local fisherman to catch him some fish. There were I think 4 different species: chir, chuk, peled, and okun. We helped him collect dorsal muscle (to examine mercury content), length, sex, stomach content (to determine diet and use later for isotopic research), and opercula (to determine fish age). It was very messy and the mosquitoes were biting but we learned quite a bit about the science of fish and what they can indicate about an ecosystem.

Once the fish were scaled and cleaned, we ate them for dinner. Yum yum. And with hopes of leaving around 5:00, we headed south around 1:30 a.m. towards Duvannyi Yar.

-Boyd Zapatka, Student, Clark University

-Tyler Llewellyn, Student, Western Washington University