Wiebke and Ben download soil temperature and surface radiation data. Photo by Thomas Projs.Greetings from the North! We are Benjamin Runkle, Thomas Projs, and Wiebke Kaiser from the University of Hamburg, and have been on Samoylov Island for just over a week.

 

We are here to study connections between the water cycle and the carbon cycle in this interesting permafrost tundra landscape. Here is an initial report on our experiences thus far. But first, a brief introduction.

 

I (Benjamin) am a post-doctoral research scientist in Hamburg, where I work with Jun.-Prof. Lars Kutzbach on questions of surface water hydrology, the dissolved organic matter that these surface waters contain, and the uptake and release of greenhouse gases (CO2, CH4) between the landscape and the atmosphere.

 

This year we had the opportunity to bring two geography education students with us to the Samoylov research station. Their role is to help interpret the site's geography – how the landscape works, by which processes the snow melts – and to bring these findings later into schools around Hamburg. Thomas and Wiebke have both been to Russia before, but neither has been so far north. I think their initial immersion has provided many new experiences and feelings, and both are eager to explore and share more of this landscape with others.

 

Wiebke, Thomas, and Ben on the north end of the island on a snowy Sunday hike. Photo by Benjamin Runkle.Our journey here was long – we are 8000+ kilometres from Hamburg and there is nothing like a direct pathway. We flew through Moscow to Yakutsk, where we ended up waiting for a week for good enough weather in the Arctic port city of Tiksi to allow an onward flight. From Tiksi we helicoptered to Samoylov since the river's ice conditions were not stable enough to trust an over-ice vehicle.

 

Our arrival on the island allowed us to see the effects of a few warm days – melted water, open ponds, and little snow beyond wind-blown banks. There was Order Cialis Online more surface water flowing out of our measurement points than at any time since they were installed last summer. However, all this open water soon re-froze as we entered a week of cold and wind and snow.

 

Our goals here are to study how the snow melts and to see how this meltwater transforms into streams and rivulets across the polygon surface, flowing eventually towards the branches of the Lena that surround us. In the field we observe where water is flowing, and try to quantify how much is moving.

 

A Siberian lemming hiding under the melting snow. Photo by Benjamin Runkle.We take samples of this water back to the laboratories on the island and in Germany so that we can further characterize its chemistry. For example, we are interested to learn how much of the organic-rich soils dissolve some of their carbon into the water, and how many micro-nutrients this water contains. During the frozen period, we have the chance to take stock of how much snow and ice are in different parts of the landscape – these stores of water are essentially the fuel for later flows. We have also used this frozen period to take some soil and pond-ice cores so that we can measure the nutrients in the frozen soil. This data may be useful to help understand the concentrations of these nutrients in the waters that we later sample.

 

We look forward to a warmer set of weeks so that we can really see the transformation of this mostly frozen landscape into a flowing set of waterways. We also await the big spring flood of the Lena River. Yesterday that flood was above the city of Yakutsk but still more than 1000 km upstream from the delta. The flood may or may not arrive this far north before we leave in early June...we will just have to wait and see.