Wiebke's ice-breaking games (Photo by Benjamin Runkle)this is Wiebke, Ben and Thomas again (Thomas reporting). We're still on Samoylov – as we are surrounded by an increasing amount of water and it's hard to escape. The Lena slowly rises and we are impatiently waiting for the big spring flood. Already we can see some bigger icebergs from time to time, sometimes crashing into others of their kind, creating an impressive noise that lets us realize the big force of the silent water flow.

 

On one of our walks by the Lena riverside we found an old shoulder blade bone that was washed up by the flood and probably comes from the older island of Kurugnahk, where several mammoth bones have been found in previous expeditions. Unfortunately our find is too small to have come from an adult mammoth. But then, on the other hand, the river also brings plastic bottles from over four thousands kilometers further south: empty messages from civilization.

 

Samoylov, which had seemed a bit like the Nordic legendary Helheim when snow-covered, with little vegetation and the cemetery-like polygons, now is awaking to life. With temperatures above zero, less wind and the indefatigable sun of the polar day, the moss becomes softer and greener; from time to time a lemming runs between our yellow rubber boots and we can see more and more birds passing by. Some of them are even confident enough about their dancing skills to let us watch their courting ceremony.

 

Ben & Thomas get ready to drill a core (Photo by Wiebke Kaiser)Closer to the birds' routes and further away from the always frozen permafrost we are on the Eddy-tower; a scientific measuring tower positioned in the centre of the island play online blackjack 21 and draped with measuring sensors like a Christmas tree. It measures gas fluxes, temperatures and humidity as fast as twenty times per second and feeds with them the computer mind on its bottom; but is also useful as a lookout point for the insatiable eyes of our cameras. It allows us to overview the island and get an idea of the differences in the relief.

 

To get to the opposite direction of where the tower leads us, we need to drill into the frozen ground, which we do with a special German coring-machine. We need all our force and weight to get some few decimeters into the permafrost – and the prize of our sweat is a frozen core-sausage with some different soil-layers.

 

Wiebke and Thomas and a washed-up shoulder blade (Photo by Benjamin Runkle)We use the spiritual power of the tundra to get rid of our unconscious aggressiveness and help the sun in its fight against the ice by breaking it; to free the three weirs, on which we measure the amount of melting water from the snow.

 

We sample the water to get an idea about the amount of nutrients; or we just let its sound run through our ears, having a nap in the sun – as the temperatures awake the mammal in the homo scientist sapiens, and our remaining rests of hibernation... Or you can just say that we are also "sampling time" and discovering the tundra with more senses then with only our intellect; for, according to the words of F. Hölderlin: poor are the people when they think – but godlike when they dream...

 

 

 

Greetings from the Siberian tundra,
Wiebke, Ben and Tom