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Seida 2013: Tundra Smog and birds´attack
(Photo: Carolina & Richard) Angry bird guarding the study site. Tuesday, 30th of July 2013
We are in week number five already and still the good weather is continuing. One full month in Tundra has passed with only one day of rain and we feel that this year's field season is quite exceptional.
Whereas last summer had some warm days, this on-going heat and drought is new for us and will hopefully result in some exiting insights related to our field studies.
A strange weather situation occurred by the end of last week, when some sort of dusty fog developed and started to cover first the sky and later on our whole study site in mist and strange light.
This "Tundra Smog" persisted the whole weekend and only started to disappear yesterday evening. Apparently there was a mention of Smog in Vorkuta region in the news.
(Photo: Carolina & Richard) Lake wall and peat circlesAll our measurements are going well so far, although we face some trouble with local birds, which have built their nests close to our flux sites and vigorously defend their territory whenever we try to pass by.
But this way at least we hear each other approach, being announced by frantic shrieks and a cloud of birds attacking from above ;-)
Besides last week's usual measurements we additionally took some gas samples from bare peat walls surrounding the thermokarst lakes.
Our study site is characterized by the occurrence of many bare peat surfaces ("peat circles"), which exhibit a special behavior in respect to gas fluxes.
They are embedded within a large peat plateau and yet behave differently to the adjacent areas, mainly due to the absence of plants and on-going cryoturbation (frost action).
(Photo: Carolina & Richard) Lake wall CO2 measurementThe peat walls also cover a significant area, considering the large number of thermokarst lakes within the region. Thus we decided to do some lake wall measurements this summer, in order to determine their impact on the regional gas balance.
Most of our lab work is finished, all that is left is the chloroform fumigation experiment (to determine the microbial biomass in different soil layers), which we have started today.
As July is almost over, there will be some changes regarding our field team at the turn of the months.
More about that will follow in our next posting.
Written by Carolina and Richard