Category: Arctic

The sun on the breast of the new-fallen snow….

I thought it was bad enough yesterday, when I got in the car to drive to work, looked over and saw this:

But I went to work and went on about the business of getting travel arrangements made for the crew and ordering field supplies and whatnot.  It snowed off and on all day, and was so windy that the crew waiting to install a radar on the roof of the BARC had to call off the lift with the crane due to high winds.

Last night the winds were still in the 20+mph range, gusting higher.  The surface of the lagoon next to my house, which started to have patches of open water in the warm weather of a couple of weeks ago, were showing some chop, and it was rather grim-looking all around.

Chop on Middle Salt Lagoon

Apparently it kept snowing during the night, because in the morning the TundraGarden looked like this:

New-fallen snow in June

I spent the morning in a training Webinar for the Alaska Heritage Resource Survey (AHRS) remote web access system, and the first part of the afternoon taking some officials from the US Department of the Interior on a tour of Nuvuk (many thanks to Scott Oyagak for driving us in his truck, because the wind was pretty nasty) and the Nuvuk lab.  Apparently one of their staffers had been on a site tour I gave in the last couple seasons and really liked it, so they wanted a tour too.  They got to see a lot of ice and gravel, the Birnirk National Historic Landmark (NHL), Nuvuk, Plover Point, and get their pictures taken at the Top of the World, but no bears.

I then got to spend the rest of the day dealing with the aftermath of someone having sideswiped the UICS Ranger while it was parked beside the BARC.  It was on the passenger side, facing away from the building entrance, and we hadn’t driven it for a couple of days, but there was no dust on the new dent, so it was recent.  Looks like someone was backing out of their parking space and hit it.  They didn’t bother to leave a note, or call (the truck has decals).  Pretty lame.  No way they could have done that much damage and not noticed.  Fortunately, it seems like they just made a huge dent in the side of the bed, but the door opens fine & it doesn’t seem to have affecting the driving, as far as Tammy could tell on the way to and from the body shop trying to get an estimate.

Almost all of the travel is arranged, and tomorrow I can update the logistics calendar.  Just hope it warms up a bit for the fieldwork…

 

A new crew

Once again, I have been spending time choosing the crew for the summer season at Nuvuk.  There are a lot of factors that go into the choice, as I explained last year.  Once again, I think (hope) I’ve got a good group.  Most of the high school students have worked on the project for some time, some for several years.  We’ve got one who has been working in the lab for months, and a couple who are totally new.  We start orientation on June 13th.

One of the NSF-funded folks was actually on the crew in 2009.  Dr. Tom Besom was going to be in Kamchatka this summer, but the project sort of fell through, so he’s coming back to Nuvuk.  A good thing, since he is fluent in Spanish (his primary research specialty is Andean mummies) and will be a big help with making sure the Mexican students from the Mexican-American Exchange project who will be joining us get clear explanations and translations.  Krysta Terry was also going to return, but her father has a serious health problem, so she can’t take off for the Arctic.  Even though we have jet service twice daily and three times on Thursdays and Saturdays, it can take a couple of days to get to most place that aren’t on the West Coast; more than that if the planes are fully booked with tourists or the weather is foggy.

I’ve still got to do the final update of the memo we’ve developed for new crew on what and what not to bring (no flashlights), and send that out.  Now the fun of trying to book cheap, yet not horrendous travel for five people to Barrow…

The Snowman at the Top of the World

On yesterday’s trip to Nuvuk we came upon this fellow…

The snowman

just standing there at the northernmost spot of Point Barrow, all alone…

at the Top of the World

First trip to Nuvuk in 2011

I went out to Nuvuk today.  The purpose of the trip was to accompany Hank Statscewich from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who needs to pick out a new site for an experimental current radar.  They have run it near NARL for a year, with no problems, so they want to try it further out-of-town.  Since there is a good bit of archaeology out at the tip of Point Barrow, the idea was that I could help him find a spot that was not likely to have any archaeology.  We’ll still test before anything gets put out there, but still.

It was a sunny day, but there was a good East wind off the ice.  We were heading into it, more or less, going probably 25-30 mph until we got off the road, and the ATVs from BASC didn’t have windshields on them yet (they take them off when storing them so they can fit more vehicles into a smaller space).  That bit was not fun.

The first place we went was on the younger, more western of the two prominent beach ridges, near a weird concrete and steel device that reportedly was brought over from Prudhoe Bay during the gray whale rescue.  It seemed like a good possibility, so we took GPS readings.  It looks like there has been a good bit of er

Looking at the ice on the Beaufort Sea, I was happy to see it was really flat for quite a way out.  That will make it easy for bear guards to spot bears there, if only it will stay that way.

Flat ice on the Beaufort Sea, at the farthest north point in the US.

We looked over toward the ridge with the Nuvuk site on it.  I was very discouraging about it as a site for the radar, but Hank was curious, and enough snow had melted so we could get there without bogging down (ATVs aren’t so great in snow), so we headed on over.  There was some sort of rack that was new since fall, so I wanted to look at that.

Looking SE toward the Nuvuk site.

While we were over at the site, I double-checked how far we had tested in relation to the telephone pole with a light on it, since there is interest in mounting something on that pole, and access will be an issue until we are sure there are no graves right around the base.  We mark the end of the tested area with a line of driftwood, which we move inland at the end of every field season.  It’s only a few meters from the pole, so we should be able to clear that one way or another this summer.

Looking toward the Beaufort from the middle of the site. The line of driftwood on the ground marks the limit of the tested area.

The “rack” turned out to be a table-like construction which was labeled as a survey marker for North Slope Borough Wildlife Department.  I checked with them when they got in, and the survey is due to be completed in four days, so it won’t be a problem for us.  I took a picture of Hank on his ATV while we were there.  Actually, I took several with his camera too, but the image never looked in focus to me, so I took some with my camera just to make sure.

Hank S. at Nuvuk

We stopped at another spot that was also a possible radar site.  Hank will take the GPSs back and do calculations to determine which one would work best for the radar, and then let me know and we’ll test it as part of determining if it can go out there.

The ride back was great, since the wind was at our backs.  Alas, my face is covered with what look like hives, which is what happens when I windburn

The snow is finally melting!!

We had a serious amount of snow last winter, although I’m not sure if it was an all-time record or not.  By a couple of weeks ago I was beginning to get a bit worried.  We’ve started work at Nuvuk in June some years ago, but it was pretty miserable.  We’re starting in early July this year, but at the rate the snow was melting it was looking as if we might still have snow patches on the ground when we started.

However, we’ve had some warm sunny weather the last couple of weeks, and the snow is melting.  Patches of tundra are starting to show through; people are heading inland after geese.  We drove out to the end of the road to take a look at Point Barrow.  I was happy to see lots of gravel showing.  Once the gravel starts to appear, it absorbs lots of heat, and the snow melts faster.  Given another month, we should be in good shape.

Point Barrow seen from the end of the road.

It was misty when we drove out, but I think it was a mist from snow ablating (going from solid to vapor directly).  It happens here a lot on warm days, resulting in mist rising from the ground as well as from puddles  & ponds.

Last sunset until August

Tomorrow, May 11, the sun will set at 2:08 AM and rise 21 minutes later.  It won’t set again until early August.

This does not mean that there aren’t many inches of snow still on the ground, however…

The slog continues…

I am still plowing through the literature seeking out information on C14 dates.  Some of it is really hard to come by, with a date attributed to a house but no  information on the sample, either what it was or where it came from.  Then I look at the information on the artifacts from that house, turn to the plates (not naming any names here, but there are multiple offenders) to look at the artifacts, and see that the plates say they are from a house nearby.  Obviously either the text or the plates are wrong (unless they both are, but I’d rather not go there), so now one is left quite unsure of what was really being dated, and what sorts of artifacts were actually associated with that date.  Cross-dating based on artifact assemblages takes another one on the chin.

Another example from today: a date on wood and skin (what kind? caribou, seal, polar bear?) from a burial for which the description seems to indicate that it was only a few baby teeth!  It’s one thing to have typos in a dissertation, but in published books that people are expected to pay money for?  If people don’t read carefully, and compare about three different places in the book at once, it’s all too easy to accept a date at face value and assume that what is said about what it was found with is correct.  Then it gets mentioned elsewhere, and people read it there and pass it on, and so forth.

Such dates do not get high scores for context or association with the event being dated.  Actually they get zeros, since those factors are unknown.

All this in aid of a handbook article (well, two articles, since this C14 stuff should make an article as well).  On the other hand, a number of people say it should be useful.  I’m sure they’re all really glad that I’m doing it and they aren’t.  Can’t say I blame them.

Occam’s Razor is going to be coming in handy

The fun with radiocarbon dates continues.  I did manage to get a proposal off to a client, make some preparations for the summer field season and take care of the usual admin sorts of things.  Otherwise, I was working on the C14 dates.

It was slow going, in part because I read French much more slowly than I do English, and I was working my way through the Blumer compendium of St. Lawrence dates, which requires looking in at least 3 places to figure out how to evaluate the dates.  In some cases, one also has to go to other books to look at what the original excavator recorded (or didn’t).  Thank goodness for the American Museum of Natural History and their very nice downloadable PDFs (although the link seems troubled at the moment) of their Anthropological Papers.  I had a couple of them on my hard drive, which saved me a trip to get the actual books.

Anyway, St. Lawrence is going to be quite a mess.  There are a lot of whale and walrus dates, and Dumond  has calculated a correction for them by paired dating with terrestrial plants.  The only problem is that the whales in St. Lawrence are the same stock as the whales they catch here, and whalebone C14 doesn’t turn over very fast (a couple of decades at least) so they average the ∂C13 over that period.  That means that the correction factor for those whales should be the same anywhere in their range.  We’ve worked on it here for the Nuvuk graves, and the correction factor that works is much smaller.  I’m guessing walrus ingest relatively huge amounts of old carbon and skewed the calculations…

There was a very nice evening sky on the way home.

Sky from NARL. It was actually brighter, but this exposure shows the colors best.