Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Uniform of the day is: Flip-flops, athletic Shorts, and a Purple Parka

        12 MAR

Hey all. Kyle Crowder here. It was another beautiful sunny day here in the Arctic Tundra. One that anyone would dream for on spring break. My friends in the Bahamas actually had some very similar weather today. In fact the only difference was 94 degrees Fahrenheit.  

               



 We got a lot of great chemistry and acoustics work done today. I spent most of my time with Becky and CDR Smith taking snow and ice samples. I had a great time with them drilling ice cores and digging snow pits. CDR Smith and Becky were even nice enough to let me take a few samples myself. They probably quickly regretted that after they noticed that with only 8 credits of chemistry experience, I had no idea what I was doing and likely contaminated a significant portion of their data. Nevertheless, I had a good time with them and they will be taking even more samples tomorrow.  They were taking samples for snow density and are also hoping to find some trace metals and other organic material.

                Meanwhile our acoustic team got an enormous amount of work done. CDR Hager, Sam, and Will pulled in a good 40 Giga bites of data today. I wish them the best of luck going through all of that. Apparently Sam got a head start listening to an hour’s worth of data today and noticed a large spike in the data. He is speculating that he is picking up on the sounds of a fox peeing on his site which would explain the yellow snow around his instruments. Not exactly what he was looking for but there is still plenty more data to go through.

                We ended the day by riding out into the sunset, taking the snow machines out to our site on the ice. Sam, Will, and CDR Hager worked with their acoustics instruments while the rest of us took pictures and rolled chunks of ice down the ice mountain.  When we got back the rest of the scientist at BROMEX threw us a going away party as tomorrow will be our last full day in Barrow.


                 Tomorrow we will be outreaching at the local high school so look forward to hearing from Ben to hear how that goes.
P.S. the Aurora was sweet.

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