Whale of a Successful Day

Dr. Herman: Early this morning, I processed the data we got from the jury-rigged transmitter yesterday. The first 4 lines and depths were good, but the fifth line/depth was a patchwork. During the survey, I kept having to reset some things since the data started giving out on us. We figured it was the weakening transmitter, but we kept going anyway in the hopes that some of the data was good. It was a patchwork of numbers but I put them together and got a preliminary image. It looked like we expected it to:

Some overlying layer about a half meter or so thick of higher resistivity (possibly the snow cover), then a layer of intermediate resistivity about another half meter or so thick, and finally a sudden layer of very low resistivity (the water!). There was some noise, but that was to be expected with our rigged up apparatus.

I tried to go beyond this preliminary scan using a second program, RES2DINV, but that kept crashing on me due to the data varying so much in such a short vertical distance. But I figured I could work on this later in the trip, or after we returned. Working with RES2DINV is, well, touchy.

You set a bunch of parameters and try to model the data, but then you get out what looks like complete junk. Or, the program crashes for some reason. Then, you start over, working with slightly different parameters to try to tease the real information out of the data. Time-consuming, but doable. At least by the end-of-May meeting at which we need to be presenting this data. But today it was time to get the new transmitter up and running and see what it could do.

We were told last night that the replacement transmitter was to come in on yesterday evening's plane, and that someone from BASC would go over to the airport last night to pick it up. We got over to the theater after breakfast and it was right there in a nice package for us. We took it out, immediately saw the improvements the company had talked about, and then got to work setting up the array. We took it out and started taking the data.

When taking the data, we walk very, very slowly along the line so that the every-second data-taking gets a lot of data points in that 300-meter line.

I was strapped in again today, and I took 15 minutes to shuffle along each 300-meter line. James watched for bears, monitored the continued health of the transmitter, and kept an ear out on the radio for any mention of polar bear sightings (there were none).

We were nervous when we got to the end of the second line since that was where the other transmitter kept cronking on us. However, it kept going and going and going. We got 6 lines of data, something we had wanted all along, and knew that it was good. There were a couple of dicey moments, but that was due to us extending the array so that we were looking at the Arctic Ocean underneath. This was exactly what we'd come up here to do, and it was finally in our hands.

This preliminary image is available at this link. The numbers on the left-hand side and on the bottom are distances in meters. Note that the vertical and horizontal distances are not to scale. This scan penetrates downward just over a meter, while the horizontal distance is over 300 meters from one end to the other.

In this image, the higher-resistivity orange seems to be the packed snow cover on the ice. The medium-resistivity yellow and green shows the ice.

And finally, the very-low-resistivity blue is the Arctic Ocean water underneath. This certainly still has to be run through RED2DINV before we can more exactly specify the locations of the boundaries between these three parts, but this is certainly in the expected range. Tomorrow, we'll talk with the CRREL team and compare our results with their results from last week when they surveyed this line. Now I'm nervous again.

After lunch, a much-needed break. We took a cab into town, to the Inupiat Heritage Center where I gave my talk last night. This time, we wanted to have time to actually look around. And look around we did. The place was all about the culture of the Natives, and how they depended upon and co-existed with the animals of the area. Whaling is a huge part of that tradition. They hunted the whales in their boats framed in wood and covered in the hand-processed skins of the "bearded" seals. They caught and butchered the whales, everyone played a part in the hunt and processing, and they gave thanks to the whales themselves for offering themselves to the Inupiat. They treated the whale carcasses with their meat, blubber, bones and all with great care and respect so that the continuing spirit of the whales would tell their kindred how well they were treated by the Inupiat. This would ensure the whales would continue to offer themselves in years to come.

The whaling is usually done now in family groups, with family members serving as respected captains. The boat-makings are family affairs, and last for months. When many families bring in a whale, they all share in the whale itself. We learned there are 51 whaling crews in this area, and more are created as families grow larger over time. They still do this in the old way, cutting paths 10 miles or more through the rough ice in order to put up their whaling camps at the ice's edge, next to the open water.

Smoothing these paths through the ice involves the entire family, and no one is left out. I couldn't help but wonder, What do we have that's like this, passed along for at least (according to archaeologists) one thousand years.

We learned this and more both touring through the museum and through a very unusual experience. There is a garage-like area on one side of the museum, with windows so you can look into it. In this, about 15 people were working on something very, very smelly, like old, dead fish. A man who introduced himself as Perry showed us that they were making one of the whaling boats by hand. The women (no men allows to do this) were cleaning and stitching together the skins of the bearded seals they had caught last summer. These skins had been packed away wrapped around chunks of lard, which would eventually loose the hair on the skin as well as make the skin very strong but pliable. The sewing was done with the tendons of caribou (I think that was it) braided into extremely strong and thick thread. The men had put the wooden frame together, and some of them appeared to be helping the women by running errands for them.

Perry also told us something surprising: He told us to go around outside and enter the room from the outside, and that we could take pictures!

These pictures are the three "whale-boat" pictures in the usual location: http://www.radford.edu/~physclub/barrow/. And yes, the brown thing the women are working on is a couple of big, fatty, slimy, slippery, sloppy skins of big bearded seals that they were sewing together for the outside of the whale boats. That was the source of the smell.

We went into the room and talked with one of the crew members and one of the family boat captains. They talked with us for about a half an hour, telling us these things are more. And near the end, when we were getting ready to go, one of the men brought over a small bowl filled with something odd-looking, and odd-smelling.

It was small strips of whale, raw and ready to eat.

Yep, we ate whale.

The shin was very chewy and tough, but the other part (blubber) was just kinda fatty. And yes, it had a fishy taste, but not like anything I'd ever tasted.

We ate whale.

And then you are supposed to follow that with (these are their words) "fried Eskimo bread." This was like a plain Dunkin' donut, no sugar, just the fried bread (just like they said).

Yep. Whale.

After that, we tooled around town. Well, actually we walked in 15F below zero temps across a frozen bay to Barrow proper. You see, we were actually in Browerville. Think of Radford and Fairlawn, and then walking across a much-wider New River, only way frozen. The wind was howling and we were cold, but we didn't really care (well, just a little when our legs started to hurt since we didn't have the snow pants that went with our heavy jackets).

We trundled around Barrow, finding a whole lotta nothing. Houses yes, tourist-ey shops no. So friends and family, don't expect souvenirs.

We finally found out that, well, there really is nothing in Barrow, so we caught a cab (hoofing it once in the cold and wind was enough, (thankyouverymuch) back to Browerville, ate, tooled around there some more, and headed back here. I computed and blogged, James blogged and was going to have to answer about 50 emails and IMs, and we both agreed it was a great day. Not to be forgotten.

We ate whale.