The new station. Photo by Martin ProkschThe field work has officially started with the small excursion through the new station. By the way, we are the first official expedition at the new station!

 

The laboratory equipment really impressed everybody! There are several rooms full of supermodern extensive appliances and microscopes. The transport park is also quite big – vezdehod, truck Ural (which brought us here), skidder, snowmobiles, amphibious vehicle ARGO, quadrocycle, one big and one small motor boats. Everything for relaxing is also here – sauna, billiard, table tennis and fitness room. We even have tv, telephone and Wi-Fi.

 

 

I share the room with Katya Abramova, she is hydrobiologist and has worked in Lena Delta since 1987. Every day she tells us new exciting stories about copepods – planktonic crustaceans, their size is around 1mm. For example, they have 12 stages of maturing, and to distinguish them, one should count their tiny legs and parts of abdomen. When male wants mating, he grips the female with antennas on his head and hangs on her :)

 

The old station. Photo by Martin ProkschThen we visited the old station – a very nice wooden house, full of pictures, photos and just dear things, belonging to a few generations of scientists. I think many of them will miss the old station. Of course, the new one is much more comfortable, but...

The next task was to check if stations, installed in summer, still work properly. Apparently, everything just could not be excellent, and we spent some time trying to understand and then to solve the existing problems.

 

One of them was that the flux tower didn't get any energy from the new station's generator and used only the wind energy, from the small wind generator. So, the day was busy with fixing the old stations and getting the data from them.

 

I'll say that working outside is so exciting in comparison to sitting at the computer in the office!

 

 

The laboratory. Photo by Sonya Antonova

Vezdehod. Photo by Martin Proksch