Yesterday Molly and Judy went out to the Barrow Environmental Observatory (BEO) with undergraduate science students. To get to the station, we walked about a mile over the tundra on boardwalks. We started the work at a little shack, well equipped with computers, heat and other tools. There are several different studies being conducted so the external devices collecting temperature, wind speed, water level carbon dioxide and methane gas data is collected by the computer throughout the year, and can be sent to any other computer. One of our worker bee hosts, Sarah, needs to make sure the permanent instruments were working properly each day
before she goes out to collect other data.
Out in the field, Molly got to wade into one of the 3 lakes
where data is collected to help replace an instrument that measures radiation. Much of the work with instruments has to be done without gloves in the cold weather with wiping wind! When the instrument was put back together, we moved over to another lake for human collected data. We used a steel rod with centimeter marks to measure the water table depth and permafrost. For the permafrost, we just threw the rod into the ground as far as we could. Mostly, it only went about 18cm, or about 8 inches! It was fun to get to take part in the data collection. We also got to talk to another student, Janelle, who uses a pretty cool machine that latches onto the tundra and measures the amount of carbon dioxide.
Yesterday Molly and Judy went out to the Barrow Environmental Observatory (BEO) with undergraduate science students. To get to the station, we walked about a mile over the tundra on boardwalks. We started the work at a little shack, well equipped with computers, heat and other tools. There are several different studies being conducted so the external devices collecting temperature, wind speed, water level carbon dioxide and methane gas data is collected by the computer throughout the year, and can be sent to any other computer. One of our worker bee hosts, Sarah, needs to make sure the permanent instruments were working properly each day
before she goes out to collect other data.
Out in the field, Molly got to wade into one of the 3 lakes 
where data is collected to help replace an instrument that measures radiation. Much of the work with instruments has to be done without gloves in the cold weather with wiping wind! When the instrument was put back together, we moved over to another lake for human collected data. We used a steel rod with centimeter marks to measure the water table depth and permafrost. For the permafrost, we just threw the rod into the ground as far as we could. Mostly, it only went about 18cm, or about 8 inches! It was fun to get to take part in the data collection. We also got to talk to another student, Janelle, who uses a pretty cool machine that latches onto the tundra and measures the amount of carbon dioxide.
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