Back in Eureka

Here lies the laser, in its final resting place.


We made it to Eureka yesterday, but to catch up on things up to now...
Caribou is delicious! 50$ Gets you caribou, salad, homemade fries and a Heineken for supper for one person. Definitely something I was glad to do once while in Yellowknife. This is at Bullock's Bistro, and the atmosphere there is super cool. It's a small place, and the walls are covered with pictures, postcards, stickers, and writing from people who have visited.

From Yellowknife we flew with Bernard and Mike from EC up through Cambridge Bay and Resolute to Eureka, getting in just after suppertime. We started working early this morning up in the lab. We're here to take out the old laser and put in a new one. Here are Bernard and Mike.

Today we managed to dismantle and remove the old laser. The laser weighs around 3 or 400 pounds, so we had an A-frame crane brought up which we assembled and used. We (including Matt the Operator who helped us all day) are now pros at assembling and dissembling that frame and moving heavy things on it. It does not fit through doors assembled, but needs to be in the laser room to put the laser onto a dolly, and the needs to be in the garage to put the laser up in the truck, etc etc so long story short, we have the operation down to a science. This is good news, as tomorrow we will be installing a heavier new laser which comes with much more dire consequences if we drop it. Such as it is not already broken, and therefore we care whether it becomes so during installation!

After supper we went outside to play on the beach. The ice just broke up this week, but there are still plenty of chunks and mini-icebergs floating around. I have also confirmed that the Arctic Ocean is in fact very cold.
Wildlife seen to date:
- Muskox (with babies!!!!!)
- Arctic Hares (lots and lots and lots and I have a video I might try and post some other day)
- Plovers (I think. They were doing the broken-wing-distract-interfering-humans-away-from-my-nest thing.)
- Other birds. Will have to look these up but they were cool. Altogether we saw at least 3 to 4 different kinds of birds.

Made it to Yellowknife

Just a short post for now as I haven't taken any pictures yet. I traveled to Toronto last night and then caught an early flight this morning to Calgary and then on to Yellowknife. Matt the CANDAC operator is also coming from Toronto, so it's been nice to have some company today. Tomorrow we will meet up with Bernard and Mike from Environment Canada and we will all together take a Summit Air charter flight up to Eureka.

This evening will just be running a few errands getting some things Matt needs to bring up to the weather station, finding some supper (I think I'm going to eat a cariboo. Maybe an arctic char, but I've had that before so I am hoping for cariboo. I'll let you know if I do) and maybe going for a walk? We'll see. I'm pretty exhausted and it will be a long day of flying tomorrow, so I should see whether I can get any work done tonight as there will definitely be none getting done tomorrow!

I'm going back!

It's been awhile since my last blog post, but I found out last week that I'll be headed back to Eureka in several days, so I thought I'd revive ye ol' blog and record whatever new adventures come my way. This time it will be daylight while we're up there (so we can't take data this time), and we're going to replace the laser that quit at the end of the spring campaign. Wish us luck that everything goes smoothly... I'm counting on the extra vitamin D to keep everyone happy and stress free, but we are going to be trying to move things that weigh several hundred pounds, and there won't be much space to move said things around in, so I guess we'll see! I'm excited, anyways. So this week I am packing and writing and packing and writing and re-analyzing data (all of which are not that exciting to watch or read about), and I'll put more updates once I actually get on my way.

To keep you entertained until then: I give you the picture of me, Elliston beach (root cellar capital of the world, in case you were unaware. It's on the east coast of Newfoundland near Bonavista), and the puddle on a rock which had tiny bugs that I seem to be quite enthralled with. Chad thought it was funny and I think he took the picture mostly because it shows an excellent display of Emily Fashion Sens(ibl)e with the legwarmers visible even in the middle of summer. I don't care if it was June - it was chilly!

Final days...

Don't make me leave!

I'll be heading home tomorrow morning with a Summit Air flight from Eureka to Yellowknife. We'll stay there overnight, and in the morning fly to Edmonton, then on to Toronto, and finally I'll catch an airport shuttle back to London.

This trip has been a terrific experience, and I've learned so much. I've got tons more photos which I will post here this weekend once I'm back to the land of speedy internet.

Thanks for an awesome month, Eureka!

More pictures from the last few days

It has been a tired few days for me trying to switch back from nightshift, so here are some pictures.

Sundogs!
Arctic Fox in a Snowbank (what I didn't put up are the two pictures I took of the wrong snowbank. I saw the fox, and then took a picture of the snowbank to the right. Twice, before I noticed...) This little guy lives around the station and one of his favourite spots is in a little hole in that snowbank where you can see him in the picture. I took this out the dining room window at the station.
This next picture, I did not take. It's in the folder Rodica gave me and I think she said Volodya took the picture. Anyways, this is what the fox looks like when you can actually see him! (He's really little by the way, about the size of a regular sized cat?)

Ozonesonde on a milk crate. The ring on the top is tied by a string to a weather balloon.

The yellow thing with the curly bits is the GPS. The flat metal strip on the right somehow measures temperature and pressure but I'm not sure how. The part that measures the ozone is inside. The clear straw you see sticking out the right side in the above picture sucks in air. It brings it into a tube with 2 solutions which transfer ions in the presence of ozone. It basically works just like a battery, so the sonde just measures the current, and can infer how much ozone there must be at that altitude. Nifty, eh?

Group Picture

Here's the whole Polar Sunrise team:

From left to right: Emily, Tom, Cristen, Rodica, Bernard, Volodya, Felicia, Pierre, Bec and Matt

Photo by Volodya

Two students from U de Sherbrooke, Konstantin and Yann are also up at Eureka, but their instrument is not at PEARL. They work on a starphotometer at 0PAL right by the station. When we're at the station overnight (if it's cloudy) we generally eat supper with these guys who are also on night shift. More often than not, Mike (I think he's a MetTech - he works in the weather office) is up with us too, but he just switched off of night shifts the other day.

More of the lab and how we do things

Rodica took the first two pictures. This one is the office where we work at the lab. That's Bernard on the phone. I sit at the other desk that you can see in the corner. There are two more desks in this office, and there's another office just the same next door. As you can see, I'm missing.

And that's because I'm in here at the time, letting Rodica take pictures of me "working with the lidar". She's the one who took the lab pictures I posted earlier. In this picture, the laser and a turning mirror are above me. The light goes down to the bottom part to go through the Raman cell.
This is also at the lab. There's a kitchen on the wall behind the chairs with a stove, sink, fridge, cupboards, etc. We sit in here and watch movies after our brains are too tired to do real work any more but we have to stay up to mind the laser for another 4 hours.
Here's one of the trucks that drives us up to the lab. There's a white one just the same and another with the water tanks on the back. Matt and/or Pierre drives us up when we need to go, so usually one of them brings us up in the evening, and then we wait at the lab until just before supper the next day and drive home with the day shift. There are heated garages here and at the station (although there it's not attached to the building) so that the cars will start again. There was a discussion at brunch today over just how long you have to hold the key down for the engine to start in some of the other trucks (15 seconds) and how much gas you actually need in the truck for it to work right in the cold. Anything not in the garage needs to be plugged in or left on.