The joint Russian-German Expedition Lena Delta is divided roughly to six periods covering the months from April to September. Usually, each monthly period brings a new crew to the island, only few engineers and scientists staying longer than one month at the time.

In our July crew, we have scientists from many different fields, in addition to three engineers whose task is to make sure that all instrumentation will work properly and will produce data also during the winter months, when the station is usually empty of scientists.

The German part of the July expedition includes five scientists:

Hanno Meyer. Picture: V. Kochan.Dr. Hanno Meyer is a geoscientist at AWI, whose main research area is paleoclimatic reconstruction and the evolution of Arctic temperatures in special. He analyzes isotopic composition of the permafrost ice in the Arctic in order to define the age and temperature at a given time.

During this July expedition Hanno will focus on a new installation and calibrate a new laser optical instrument in the meteorological container of the station, which will measure the isotopic composition of the ambient air. Only this new generation of laser spectrometers allows for the first time continuous and mostly autonomous measurements of the air itself, whereas in former times scientists were confined to sample precipitation events.

Lars Kutzbach. Picture: M.M. Gamez, UHAM.Prof. Lars Kutzbach, Uni Hamburg PI in our PAGE21 project, is an expert on CH4 and CO2 emissions from permafrost landscapes. He has been conducting eddy covariance measurements on Samoylov since 2002 trying to find out whether there can be found long-term changes in the CH4 and CO2 emissions. In fact, he has already detected pronounced inter-annual variability of the fluxes of these greenhouse gases, the methane emissions regularly increasing and the CO2 uptake decreasing during the warmest summers.

Ph.D. students Josefine Waltz, Mercedes (Nana) Molina Gámez and Tim Eckhardt are from University of Hamburg. Tim and Josefine both investigate the greenhouse gas emissions from permafrost soils. Josefine’s PhD project aims at evaluating maximum possible amount of emissions from different soil types excluding the ecosystem respiration, while Tim’s project measures the actual out coming emissions from these soils in to the atmosphere. Nana on the other hand will investigate the quality of the organic matter in permafrost thaw landscape in order to characterize the chemical carbon stability on the soil. For this, she will drill permafrost cores in different landscape formations and fractionate and analyse them back home in the lab.

 

 

Josefine helping out with lake measurement. Picture: L. Viitanen.	Nana and few mosquitos: Picture: M.M. Gámez, UHAM.
Tim. Picture: L.Viitanen.