Last Day

Dr. Herman: Oddly enough, there's definitely a part of me that does not want to leave.

This morning, we got the last of the data that will allow us to create a three-dimensional image of the ice. The two scans this morning, along with the three taken yesterday afternoon, finished all that we wanted as far as data was concerned.

But coming off the ice for the last time (with Ohmy) around noon was a bit, well, weird. I know it was just a week, shorter than a week even, but I'd grown used to the place. It's desolate here, with not a tree in sight anywhere. The land is covered in blowing and drifting snow, with the houses built on wooden pylons so that the snow will blow under them and not bury them in snow drifts. The land is flat, no mountains such as those around Radford. The colors are various hues of white, with the occasional wind-blasted paint on the buildings interrupting things. And the sea ice is absolutely, totally barren, dangerous and painfully cold.

And absolutely beautiful.

I look out and imagine the whaling crews and families making the ice trails out to where the open waters are, not noticing the cold such as we ignore a cool breeze in the summertime. We haven't seen any bears, but I know they're out there somewhere, wandering around on their big, flat, padded feet, looking for their next meal. Or just playing in the nice, frigid polar waters. I know there are white arctic foxes out there, looking to survive until their next meal. There are Native Alaskans out on the ice somewhere, just wandering around "looking for some space." It's quiet and cold, and oddly not forbidding, more alluring than anything.

With all the problems we've had to deal with and overcome, we never had time to really do the tourist thing and just walk around on the ice. I know we'd have to take a radio with us, and it would be best to have had a local guide (with a bear gun). But we were both talking tonight about how amazing it would be to just walk out there just to get to the point where land could no longer be seen, where we absolutely knew we were completely within the realms of the great, cold, fading/warming north polar ice cap.

It's like getting close to the summit of a mountain and having to turn back due to bad weather or darkness. But we do think we'll be back.

Oh well...

This afternoon, we took some time to compare our data with that obtained by the CRREL-led team. Last night, we exchanged data with the computer guru on their team, us giving him the image that's on the www.radford.edu/~physclub/barrow page and him giving us an Excel file with their hand-obtained (with a hand-held instrument) snow depths. Free exchange of scientific data, whotta concept. I'd spent part of the morning plotting their data and then figuring out how to blow up our images and their graph without losing resolution. Picky little thing to have to figure out, but very useful to know for presenting our results later.

After some trial and error with a big plotter printer here, I got most of our combined plots to print out on the nice, big poster-sized paper.

(Maybe I can sneak their giant printer out and back to Radford in my suitcase???) On this combined plot of the data, you can see their data for the depths of the snow cover for about 135 meters along our 300 meter line. Solid ice lies underneath, then the seawater. They had a single line graph showing the snow depths. But when I put their data right above our image (blown up to the same, large scales) you see an astounding correlation with their direct measurements and our two-dimensional image.

You can follow the bottom of the snow on both graphs as it gets shallower and deeper, just about in complete lockstep from one to the other. Any discrepancies there were seem to result from our line being about 3/4 of a meter to one side of theirs (we walked next to their line since they had wooden stakes right in the middle of their line). In other words, bingo.

No one seemed to be around the BASC area this afternoon, so James and I got our snail mail letters and other things done, and caught a taxi. But we did have one more very important job to do before leaving.

We carefully prepared things for this one job.

We lined up the appropriate cold-protection clothing.

We went to the Theater staging area as we'd done so often before for our work here.

We let some of the guides know where we were going in case of any emergencies.

We checked to see that all of our batteries were charged.

And then we went and did it. It was quick, efficient work, something to be proud of for a long time. Something timeless and permanent. Something to show our grandkids.

You can see our results here

(http://www.radford.edu/~physclub/barrow/031706-tacky-shirts-1.jpg) and here (http://www.radford.edu/~physclub/barrow/031706-tacky-shirts-1.jpg).

Finally, we were finished with all of our official work here in Barrow. We caught a cab into town, ran some errands, ate at a local place with a great view of the sea ice, and did the tourist bit quite thoroughly. We found a place that sold furs, although the vast majority of the furs were from somewhere else. (And for those of you wondering, these are not furs-from-the-farm.) It was very cold and windy outside, as the wind-chill thermometer (http://www.radford.edu/~physclub/barrow/031706-wind-chill-thermometer.jpg) shows nicely. The gusting winds made the actual temperature of -10F feel like 35 below. The shop was warm, so we looked around. We saw some very interesting things there, including (I kid you not) a bin full of various varmint tails (http://www.radford.edu/~physclub/barrow/031706-critter-tails-1.jpg). Not in Kansas any more.

But in the end, we finally stumbled on a real, honest-to-goodness tourist-trap place. We were at another dead end looking for a particular piece of tourist stuff when someone overheard us asking about any other such places where we could look. This being the frontier, naturally this stranger offered to give us a ride over to Barrow from Browerville where we were. He dropped us off at the Top of the World Hotel and lo and behold, there it was. A 12-foot-by-12-foot room that actually had things in it that said "Barrow, Alaska" or something similar. We did it. After traveling thousands of miles, after getting so cold that the skin of my nose is peeling, after troubleshooting very expensive equipment, after competing scientifically with some of the best scientist in the world, we had FINALLY found a tourist shop.

Life is good.

We cabbed it back to our home-away-from-home at the NARL Hotel, and took our printouts of our compared data to a meeting with the CRREL-led team.

They were pretty excited, even asking if they could keep the so-so big printout that I'd generated. Of course we said yes. And then they agreed to give us even more of their data so that we could compare our results with even stronger measures. This was a very good thing, and we'll be presenting our work with confidence at the American Geophysical Union Meeting at the end of May in Baltimore.

We came back to our rooms, and it's sadly time to end things. We'll pack ourselves and our equipment up, and fly out of here tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. local time (4 hours behind Radford). If all planes are on time, we'll fly into Dulles airport in the D.C. area Sunday morning at 6:45 a.m., after yet another 17 hours in planes and airports.

It will be great to get back home, but it will be hard to leave. I know I'll have to wander out on the ice a bit tomorrow morning for a last look.

Our guide in that picture on the RU homepage these last few days is named Keith. We asked him on Monday about his thoughts on visiting the "lower 48" (as we're known up here). He said that he could never imagine going down there because, as he said, "I need my space." There is space here aplenty, cold and beautiful and alluring.

I will be back.