Thursday, 5 July 2012

As promised, today we are sending a picture of our group taken on Tuesday. Meanwhile the soil scientists from Syktyvkar, Sasha and Andrej, have arrived and completed our team for July (not in the picture).

Mosquitoes in Tundra, photo: University of Eastern FinlandAs you can see, the weather during the past days was very nice, sunshine combined with some 25 degrees. For working in the Tundra this was already quite warm, since there is no shade anywhere and of course the mosquitoes were loving it as you can see it on the picture. Almost every member of our team came down with a nice sunburn.

These past few days we continued with the site set-up and also built and installed most of our equipment, like groundwater wells and soil gas and water collectors. The main effort for this week was the task of building the wooden bridges along the flux plots, in order to not disturb the fluxes during gas sampling and to protect the landscape during our multi-year study. This heavy task was carried out by the boys. In this context we owe thanks to our cook Zhenja, who is the most important person in our group, feeding us and thus giving us energy for the heavy work days and the daily walk to our study site. The pancakes we now had as a dessert for the third evening this week certainly work and are keeping us happy.

 

Building bridges, photo: University of Eastern FinlandLast night the weather changed and we faced a stormy and rainy day today. Luckily we have a large Finnish army tent, which we put up at our new study site just in time yesterday. Now we are able to store our equipment there and have some shelter during the day. The weather station is already logging, although some adjustments to the program still need to be done – this we will do on the weekend. One day to go till "banja" (Russian sauna) and cold drinks, yeah!

 

 

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