The second day of my field work was the bad weather day. It started with a light snow that got heavier and heavier. The work that we had was fairly simple: walking around with a waterproof, coldproof, shockproof laptop/tablet called a Toughbook (they're really cool) mapping glacial flutes with GPS data. Glacial flutes are long, half-cylindrical trails of sediment that form behind large boulders in the direction of glacial flow, like a glacial shadow where the boulder creates a vacuum, and the "shadow" is filled with the glacial till. In any case, it became increasingly difficult to see the flutes as the snow accumulated on the ground. Eventually it was time for lunch. We all had DryTech meals - orange bags of dehydrated food that you just needed to add hot water to. This day I had beef stew, to which I added one of my dried fruit balls which made it taste pretty good. Honestly, after walking around in the snow, a warm meal was greatly appreciated.
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About halfway through eating lunch the snow turned to rain. The snow was melting all around me and the water was making its way through my layers of clothes. Being wet and cold all afternoon was no fun. My group was taking geological notes about a large hole that the previous group had dug. At about 3pm, I made myself a garbage-bag poncho by punching some holes in a big black garbage bag. Also, my rabbit fur hat was completely drenched, looking like a dead wet animal. Finally at 5pm, the rain had stopped, but I was very wet. We were able to go home to our warm cabin and eat snacks. We also got to put our wet things in a drying room. I put in my hat (which took two days to dry), and all three pairs of gloves that I brought.
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| By the time we left for the day, all the snow had been melted away by the rain |
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| My poor field notebook drying. |
For dinner we had tomatoey fish stew with hard chunks of fish. That night, the wind was really loud, and climbing out of my tent for my 1am-2am polar bear guard shift especially frustrating.
The next day was dry and beautiful, if a bit windy.
I had a Pasta de Provence DryTech lunch, and beef stew for dinner. My polar bear watch was 2am-3am, and it was very very windy. But the dog had been removed (someone rightly complained that the dog was more of a nuisance than a help).
The last day of field work, and the second to last day of camping, we went out a little further on the outwash plain, taking notes on an area outside where we spent the last two days. Then we dug a geology hole, about a meter deep into the cold, rocky sediment of a megaflute.
For lunch, I had another pasta DryTech, and as you can see below, we all huddled together in a small depression in the ground for windcover.
The afternoon was spent taking clast fabric measurements, i.e, finding rectangular rocks and measuring their orientation and dipping angle for two and a half hours.
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| some bird bones I found |
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| Field geology involves a lot of wandering around with a notebook |
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| Having finished with my geological observations, I took pictures of tiny plants |
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| More tiny plants |
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Mapping dead-ice hollows (where subsurface glacial ice melted away, making a little depression).
For dinner, we had chicken korma and rice After dinner, we may have jumped into the Arctic Ocean. It may have been very cold. But there's no photographic evidence, so know one will ever know. After changing out of wet clothes, some of us went to walk up closer to the glacier.
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The sun set behind us a bit as we walked up.
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| Nordenskioldbreen glacier close up |
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| Some selfies |
With the fieldwork done, we only had some geological wrapping up and packing up to do the next morning. Of course, this last night I had the worst polar bear guard shift: 5-6am. And the wind was blowing so hard that the tent walls were whipping back and forth loudly. I was ready to go home and have real amenities again.
