April 6, 2009
A couple photos from Saturday and Sunday...
This is the MacKenzie River ice road near Inuvik, where the Muskrat Jamboree went off this weekend (dogsled races, snowmobile races, bush skills, etc...). The town is about 3000 persons strong. We're still not sure what everyone does, but there's plenty of fishing, trapping, hunting, guiding, oil exploration, and of course lots of government jobs...
This is Daniel clearing our coring site on Little Skidoo Lake. Nice technique.
Most of the lakes up here in the MacKenzie River delta are shallow and have rich sediments, so we can get cores from the ice without too much trouble. Here Valier and Daniel are capping one that was ~30 inches long. We push the clear tube into the mud by hand and hammer it down to get as deep as possible. Then we use a jack or Valier to pull it out. Check out the skinny arctic trees catching the low sun rays...
This is one core from No Name Lake that we sampled for methane. Most of the cores we take are shipped back to Woods Hole for analysis. The idea is to use these cores as a historical record of land/soil carbon transport to the ocean. The MacKenzie River Delta is full of lakes that the river floods during the spring runoff. These are the kinds of delta lakes we've been coring (easier when frozen!). When spring floods subside, all the particles and organic carbon from the river fall to the bottom of the lake and are eventually buried. So with a sediment core we have a record of what was deposited over time. Understanding what has happened in the past should help us understand how these arctic rivers might react to warmer temperatures and melting permafrost...
Later,
DRG
