Permafrost outreach 2009

Principal Day cooked biscuits and gravy for the teachers, and fed us too. He said he was actually cooked for tomorrow, when the Iditarod mushers come through Kaltag. It's not relly for the mushers, but for the follwers, news, tourists that are travelling with the race. There were actually a lot more planes landing here today, and a couple of new groups arrived at the school today. The lead musher made it to Anvik around noon, a day away from Kaltag.

Today, our main goal for today was to install a monitoring station in Kaltag. Yesterday we asked people about the soil type and chose a patch of wooded area behind the school for the drill site. Conditions were in our favor accordint to what we learned from the locals.




Today was another windy day. Temperature much warmer, maybe even above 0F, and no wind in the trees.
Kenji started out with the portable drill set up, because of the dense trees. If we're lucky we would only need the generator the electrical hammer drill, and the stainless steel shafts. If this works, this is the ideal way to drill.



The first meter or so is usually easy, what happens after that is what really makes a difference. The first few inches was organic material, soon it became silt. Silt is relatively safe, but sometimes the silt can get sticky and suck the shaft in and glue it to the ground. Kenji said it was one of those sticky kind today. He was pulling on the auger so it wouldn't dig its self into the ground and get stuck.



Luckily, there were no gravel all the way down to 5 meters, but Kenji had to pay a lot of attention to cleaning out the hole so the shaft wouldn't get stuck. The pin on the shaft also had a problem, so adding an extension took a lot more effort than it usually does.


Once the hole was 5 meters deep, we carfully slid the PVC pipe into the bore hole. Once this is done it's great relief. The borehole is secured!


Now the thermister and data logger must be place in the hole, but first we go in the building to warm up.

When it's cold, threading the thermister cables through the PVC can be a challenge, but it is a good feeling when you have another monitoring station ready to go.