Permafrost outreach 2009

The University of Alaska EPSCoR program, NASA IPY and NSF IPY, Thermal State of Permafrost programs are conducting an outreach effort in conjunction with it's research focus on permafrost and infrastructure. The outreach effort has been termed the "Permafrost Health" program and consists of installing permafrost temperature monitoring systems!

Tuesday, March 6, 2007

 

From Tanana to Ruby





Another cold morning. Where is Spring?
Today we took some core samples from the Yukon River and talked to the students at Tanana. Although it was a rush thanks to Dorothy, she was able to coordinate Kenji's talk with the high school students.

The biggest problem for today was getting the snow machines started. Last night's temperature was well under -30F, and was still cold at 10 AM. These two new snow machines without the pull cord can be a problem at times. We also had to rearrange the sleds because of the hitch problem from yesterday.

By noon we were on the trail. Today we had to cover 120 miles of wind blown trail. Even with the trail markers, it was difficult to navigate through the drifted snow and blowing wind at times. Usually it may take about 4 hours, since we had a lot of stuff, it took us more than 6 hours. But we were still very happy to make it to Ruby, since we were also prepared to spend the night on the trail somewhere if it got dark.

Ruby is located on a hillside and the school was located on top of the hill. The heavy snow machines almost didn't make it up the hill to the school. The principal, Bruce, was kind enough to open the locked doors for us to spend the night, once inside the school Kenji is putting the ice core samples from Tanana into vials.





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