Gathering Data and Becoming Celebrities in Alaska

James: This morning Dr. Herman and I planned to begin to tackle a three dimensional survey.  After getting successful data yesterday along the 300 meter survey line, we planned to set up a 100 meter by 6 meter survey area adjacent to it.  We got up and got ready and Dr. Herman told me that we had a meeting with Anne Jensen first this morning.  Jensen had heard about the equipment we were using and its potential for some archeology work.  That meeting ran a little long and we didn’t get started on the survey in the morning.  We did get a chance for a photo shoot before lunch with the RU flag.

After lunch, we were off to the ice to lay out new survey flags.  We lined up and measured out 6 more lines parallel to the first 100 meters of line we have been working on all week.  This is not a trivial matter in the cold and wind.  Today the wind had picked up, which made it really cold out there.  The idea is to take lots of data of the square we set up and create a 3-D "cat scan" of the sea ice.  We came back to the theatre and Dr. Herman got suited up with the equipment.  The new transmitter was still working great which helps.  The wind and new lines made keeping the transmitter and receiver tail stay on the line difficult.  I consistently was running (well walking fast, you can’t run much in the snow suit) back and forth keeping the equipment on the survey line.  We got half of the survey completed in about two and a half hours I think and then came in for dinner.  Tomorrow we plan to finish it up in the morning.

We had dinner with a radio station host there in Barrow named Earl Finkler.  After dinner, we made a recording for his Saturday morning show.  I mostly just sat in.  Finkler was interviewing Dr. Herman on what brings him to Barrow and more extensively on his thesis work on black holes.  It was just a short 10 minute interview but it was interesting.  My first radio broadcast, even though I only said one sentence.

We showed our data to some of the CRREL scientists and they were enthusiastic about out results.  The snow and ice depths seemed to match very well with there data.  The only difference is that we have a cross sectional picture of the ice.  We can see small features, undulations, etc.  The good new is that everything things to seem to be going very well for us now.  All our data is raw and has not been processed yet.  This will take a little bit of time once we get back to Radford but we will work quickly to put everything together.