Blogs from Inuvik, Northwest Territories, Canada, North America - page 3

Today Sue and I did our sampling from helicopter floats! Such an adventure. Some of the lakes Sue has included in her study are more isolated than the ones we have been using the canoe on and would be a 45 min hike dragging the canoe through the forest to get to them. So helicopter is our mode of transportation. Helicopters are soooooo expensive! Luckly the Lesack lab has a grant for helicopter time so we hopped onto a Long Ranger at the airport and off we went. The delta looks so unreal from the sky! Hundreds of lakes scattered around the muddy river. We went to 4 lakes today and collected our usual samples. The pilot kept the helicopter running while we climbed out onto the floats with our zooplankton nets, bottles, seives and ... read more

Well today was our first field day on the Mackenzie delta and the weather apparently did not know this, or maybe it did.... Sue is studying the landscape-level variation of dissolved organic carbon amoung the delta lakes, particularly the effects on food web structure and implications of the future (ie global warming). We roared down the silt filled channel in our 16 foot motor boat. Sue says that the river is low this year, meaing that there was not as much of a flood this year. The banks of the river looked like perfectly aligned vertical stacks of mud with trees leaning directly at us as we passed by. The trees lean in toward the centre of the channel because the permafrost beneath them is melting in the summer sun (24 hours/day of it!). Our ... read more