The route form Samoylov to Berlin. Image: Sonya Antonova.Our hope for the flight to Yakutsk on Friday disappeared due to the weather conditions; so we had to stay in Tiksi for the weekend. That was not easy for those of us who planned to be in civilization by that time : ). Desperate even moved our team to go to the cinema and to watch Scary Movie 5 in Russian : ).

 

Sunday evening a strong fog came to Tiksi and some experienced people predicted us to stay there another two weeks. But fortunately, the weather was excellent on Monday and we could fly to Yakutsk directly, by the way, because the airport in Tiksi was already opened. In 2.5 hours we got in summer : ).

In Yakutsk we had to stay two days more. Traditionally, we had an excursion to the Permafrost Institute. First time in my life I was inside the permafrost, when we went downstairs to the underground part of Institute. Afterwards, we had a very nice dinner with traditional frozen raw fish salad and not so traditional, but tasty, Czech beer. Next day we were picked up by our colleague Misha Grigoriev, and drove to the Lena River, to watch the last ice break up. 

Thursday morning we started our long-awaited flight to Moscow. Expedition was over, and it was time to say goodbye. I stayed in Moscow another 3 days and others took the plane to Berlin few hours later.

Some of us took many samples: snow for the isotopic analysis and frozen ground cores. They are too many to take them just in luggage, so they will arrive later. Most of them will be proceeded at AWI and Hamburg Uni. This time my tasks didn't assume any sampling, so I can't tell you more precisely about processing : ).

 

It is time to say goodbye to the blog, we will see us in summer!

And at last I just want to say to everybody that I really like all of you, even though it was hard to see sometimes : ). And thanks for the great time!

 

Poka!