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:

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.

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.

 

 

While doing science surely requires an extensive amount of thinking, the fact is that large part of the work is very practical and technical in nature.

The state of the art instrumentation used today in science requires a highly skilled technicians and engineers, who, while preparing and operating the instrumentation, also have understanding on the natural processes behind the data. It is thus more of a rule than exception that the engineers working in science have at least master’s level education also in natural sciences on top of their technical skills.

We have three engineers in our group on Samoylov, and without exaggeration it can be said that very little would happen here without them.

Molo, alias Günther Stoof, has participated regularly in the Lena delta expedition for the past 15 years. He has thus great experience in basically everything that might come up both in and outside the work here on the island. He is really the backbone of the German groups on Samoylov and as a fluent Russian speaker an important connection between the scientists and the station staff.

Niko Bornemann is an engineer in Julia Boike’s SPARC group and another very important part of the AWI Samoylov crew. Niko is responsible for all running instrumentation of the group and usually visits Samoylov more than once per season. This ongoing expedition is already his seventh visit here and the second one this summer. With his calm and patient manner he deals with anything that comes up in the equipment and is the helping hand also for other groups, whenever there is a need of fixing something.

Peatland Pete, alias Peter Schreiber, is the newcomer in the AWI crew, being the second engineer of the SPARC group. He is, however, not a newcomer here on the island having participated in Lena delta Expeditions since 2009 as part of the University of Hamburg group. At AWI his main task will be a development and installation of a high tech measurement station on Samoylov, which consists of a tower for bio-meteorological measurements, trace-gas measurements and environmental parameters. In addition, he will be in charge of a container that will be built in the field to house instrumentation that either does not tolerate or is otherwise difficult to install outside. The new tower as well as the container will be part of an international research infrastructure project.

 

The second of my tasks on Samoylov is conducting a small scale lake measurement campaign by using a new probe from the station here. This probe can conduct continuous measurements to many hundred meter depth and can give thus information on the vertical water body.

I will take a profile of five different lakes here on Samoylov and conduct repeated measurements in one of them in order to collect data on possible changes in the profile both between the lakes and also between time scales (though very short ones).

The probe is quite new and the first step was thus to figure out how it actually works. I was lucky enough to be able to team up with two of our Russian colleagues, Sasha and Olga, who are also doing lake measurements and have used the probe before.

 

Sasha managed the configuration and calibrated the instrument together with Natasha, the station laboratory person. My task ended up only been the actual measuring, which is very easy and straightforward.

Despite being easy, this is work that needs to be done in pairs. No one is allowed to use the rubber boats completely alone and life vests are part of the standard clothing for this type of work. I have had fun days with Sasha and Olga, Waldemar, Josefine and Nana in taking measurements. Here below are some pictures from those days.