Sunday, 23 July 2012

A long week of lab work is behind us. Our lab, known by the name of "white cabin", is quite small and under normal conditions would hardly qualify for the term "lab". But it is well equipped with everything we need for that part of the analyses we do here. We prepare the soil samples directly in the field for analyses that are done later on in our lab in Kuopio. Mainly this includes making soil extractions, which we freeze in Seida and then transport to Finland.

The main part of this week was taken up by this work and there wasn't much time for anything else. On Friday we were provided with a welcome distraction, when some people, who were driving a very huge tundra vehicle close to our cabin, got stuck in the wet fens in perfect view of our lab. In the picture you can see Sasha, Andrej and Misha, patiently waiting for the vehicle to be pulled out of the mud, hoping for a vehicle ride back to Seida (as it turned out, the vehicle's chains were broken and they had to walk). The whole act of rescuing and repairing the vehicle is still on-going and our usually quiet and secluded Tundra site is getting crowded with workers. Let's see what awaits us when we walk back to our field cabin tomorrow morning.

One short comment about this walk to and from Seida, as we are not sure that we have mentioned it before: It is a 1.5 hour walk on tracks that are only driven by tundra vehicles and the last part leads through tundra without any real paths. This week it has been quite hot with almost 30 degrees every day – who would have thought that in order to experience a decent summer you have to travel to the Russian Arctic! and there is no shade along the way. As we couldn't use our transport vehicle (although it was ordered) at the beginning of the week, we had to carry a lot of the equipment needed for the next week's work, such as several liters of distilled water, food etc. With heavy backpacks, heat and mosquitoes, this walk was pretty tough. Luckily there were blueberries and cloudberries growing along the way, which kept us going.

Due to this, the writers of this post (Richard and Carolina) weren't too sad about spending some more relaxing hours in the lab, instead of heading directly to our main field site for measurements. Still, besides the lab work we are proud to announce that all measurements scheduled for this week took place as planned. A huge thanks goes to Igor, who kept the flux measurements going and only returned from his work with the weather station in the late evening, when masses of mosquitoes and small black flies made it impossible to use the computer (just imagine the amount of insects glued to the notebook's mousepad necessary to stop the cursor from working...).

And as the weeks in the field seem to be too short here we again decided to extend our working days until Sunday and only went back to Seida for Banya and one well deserved day of rest on Sunday evening. Tomorrow morning the Tundra is calling us back for another round of lab analyses as well as the usual measurements.

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Main page of the blog "Vorkuta/ Seida 2012": http://page21.arcticportal.org/blogs/61-vorkuta