Cherskiy!

I’m the resident student geographer on the barge, so my background and project are a little different than the majority of the ecologists here at the Northeast Science Station. Water is a huge part of the Arctic and the landscape is covered with streams, rivers, lakes and ponds. There’s no way to be able to sample and monitor all the water bodies or to regularly look at them to see how they change from year to year or even within a year. So, I’m hoping to be able to use satellite imagery to monitor these lakes from space. This does not mean, however, that I’ll be spending all my time in front of a computer screen (although I have been doing some, just to pinpoint places that look interesting). We still don’t know how to interpret the imagery in a way that will give us information about how much organic matter is floating around in a lake or how clear a river is. My goal is to be able to take as many samples as possible from different water bodies, to create a model to interpret the satellite imagery. Once we know that, we can look at how the water properties change through time and look at the many, many, many lakes in the region that we cannot sample directly. This could give us a better idea of how carbon and organic matter flows through the system as a whole.

I’ve spent the past few days collecting and processing water samples from a nearby lake, so we’re even starting to get some data! The inner (or maybe not-so-inner) geek in me is really excited to begin looking at results and spend time out in the field. We’re getting more today and throughout the next couple weeks from a variety of lakes and rivers in the Kolyma watershed. Unfortunately, I’ve been banished to the lab with the sore throat that’s going around, so I’m not taking any samples, but the great thing about working in a group like this is that we’re very collaborative. We’ll have access to everyone’s data and be able to use it all for our own projects. We’re all making a huge amount of progress, everyone’s methods and projects are pretty much hammered out, and I think we’re all excited to be doing real field work over the past few days!