Bye Bye Summer

Hiking Across a Cloudy Canada Glacier
What I Awoke to One Morning
A Snowy Gage Inspection

Over the past week the temperatures have begun to drop and the blue sky has been blocked by low lying gray clouds.  As you can see in the pictures above, we have seen a little bit of snow fall as well.  The streams have begun to shut down/stop flowing.  A couple of sunny days and warmer temperatures may bring about some more flow, but at this point the glaciers have been cooling, no longer producing melt water.  During the last week, the team has been conducting a few different diel (24 hour) studies.  One experiment was looking at nutrient transport from the headwaters (top) to our gauging site at the stream delta.  The crew sampled at the top of the hour, every hour, at the two different parts of the stream.  My professor, Dr. Diane McKnight, and I were conducting an experiment that looked at how increased flow might scour (scrape) algae from the stream bed.  We placed a plankton net in the stream to catch any scoured algae and would collect samples every four hours.  In a previous post, I mentioned that the Dry Valley streams have a high flow and low flow period over the course of twenty four hours.  Our study was an attempt to see how those increased discharges affected the algae attached to the rocky substrate.  We sampled together until 2200 (10 p.m.), then I took the 0200 (2 a.m.) shift to collect the water and algae sample and continued sampling at 4 hour intervals.  The samples were filtered and stored to be analyzed back at the lab.  This was around the time when the whether turned and things began to slow down.  

I'm sitting in the F6 hut and the thermometer is reading 24 degrees outside.  I have 11 days remaining in the Valleys and quite a bit of work ahead.  We will be running levels to see if our control structures have shifted over the summer.  We will also swap out our storage modules so we can analyze the discharge and data we have collected over the season.  After the modules are replaced, the gage box is secured and winterized.  In addition to leveling the streams, we will run levels on different lakes in the Dry Valleys to see how much the stream discharge has caused the lake level to rise.  I hear this trip is amazing, stopping at different locations that I have yet to see on this amazing frozen continent.  

I have entered a camp hair contest, on the blog of a fellow researcher in the field.  Dr. Becky Ball and her team are studying soil carbon cycling, stoichiometry, and soil biota in the Dry Valleys.  You can check out the wild dew and cast your vote at her blog: http://polarsoils.blogspot.com.