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Seida 2013: Science that happens in Seida
(Photo: Richard and Carolina) Field team 2013Saturday, 13th of July 2013
The second week in the field has passed already and as promised we will introduce our field team in this blog. Besides us there are two Russian students from the Institute of Biology in Syktyvkar working with us in July, coincidently both named Ivan. Igor will join us every now and then and of course we have our cook Elena, who is taking care of our culinary well-being in the field, as well as acting as our translator whenever needed.
So this year we are a small but up till now very effective group.
Some scientific background about our work in the field: Our field site consists of various landform types, such as peat plateau, mineral tundra and bare peat surfaces, as well as wetland sites such as fens and willows.
Our aim is to determine the greenhouse gas balance of this site via manual measurements of CO2, CH4 and N2O.
(Photo: Carolina and Richard) Field site Furthermore we have a warming experiment going on to investigate the effect of warming on gas fluxes.
Additionally we are interested in the underlying processes determining gas release or uptake and thus have a weekly sampling schedule for soil gas concentrations within the peat profile down to the permafrost as well as for nutrient concentrations in the soil water.
Besides those samplings we also do active layer and water table measurements, to name but a few. With this full sampling plan we always feel very lucky whenever we manage to do everything until Friday evening – often it takes longer.
The most time consuming measurements though are the gas flux measurements, which take up most of the week. We are quite dependent on the weather with these, and luckily we finished everything before heavy rain set in early yesterday morning. Hence we were able to return to Seida for a heaven-like Banya on late Friday, which felt unbelievably good after a week of heavy work and little sleep.
(Photo: Richard and Carolina) CO2 measurementAfter the heat and very dry weather, the rain rendered the path back to Seida into a muddy track and it was quite heavy to walk, last but not least because of masses of mosquitoes attacking from all sides.
Apparently those Seida "Super-mosquitoes" do not mind the rain. Consequently all of us are quite happy that we will have a ride with the vehicle back to the field site tomorrow, which spares us from walking.
We have a transport vehicle about every two weeks, when fresh drinking water, gasoline as well as food ordered from Vorkuta is brought to the field site.
Most of the food has already arrived in Seida and our cook is happily checking the tons of sweets at the moment, which are absolutely necessary when doing field work in these conditions.
The boys have gone fishing near Usa river this night and we are hoping for some fresh fish for lunch tomorrow, before we return to the field.
Written by Carolina and Richard