What a busy few days it has been. There is no cell service, and internet is slow and you have to pay for it. I will post the notes I have been taking the last few days and some pictures that will hopefully entertain you. Today was much more of a repeat of yesterday, with more success, a bit more fog, and certainly another long day.
Top right: our lovely home, with our spacious truck (there are 4 of us so we get to alternate who sits in the back, and the truck is a manual so the person in the middle has to move everytime Darrell goes for reverse)
Arrived in Adak!
We got here after a few hours in the air flying southwest from Anchorage. What a unique place. The airport is the most bustling thing in town, it has 2 runways, and has 4 flights a week, two in, and two out. Other than that, there ain’t much happening and you have no way else of getting here. That includes all of the groceries, mail, etc which is ridiculously expensive.
If you read the wikipedia it will give you the jist of why such a place like this exists, which was for military operations, but now its main form of employment is cleaning up the mess that the military left here. It is kind of an eery place, especially when you see the classic McDonalds roof on a building with a faded M on its side that hasn’t been touched in 30 years. Many buildings like this exist. The grocery store (conveniently located across the street from our little home in what looks like 80s suburbia) was an old gym. The basketball hoops are all pulled back, and talk about a bargain, a can of soup (Campbell’s or equivalent) is only 5 bucks! Let’s just say it was cheaper for us to ship all of our groceries here ourselves for the week.
Weather can be kind of unpredictable here, being a small island formed from a volcano in the middle of the North Pacific, the winters usually hover in the 20s and 30s, while summers get up to about 50, with lots of rain. The e-mail from my professor in preparation of this field season can be summarized in one of his sentences “bring lots of rain gear and reading material”. Aka, expect lots of rain, and to be working in it, except when it is especially bad we will just be hanging out inside. Well, day 1, and we got lucky. I hope this is a trend that continues, but by about noon time there was just some patchy fog and for the most part visibility was great. There was some wind, a good amount of sun, and we were all in great spirits. It took us almost half the day to load up the truck with our 1,100 lbs of gear we shipped out (on one of the two planes a week that fly in from Anchorage), assembled our boat and raft. Lunch at the lake was calm and filling, and coring for mud went off without a hitch. The contraption that Darrell (my professor) has come up with is pretty ingenious. Thanks to this great contraption, good weather, and a bit of help from the coring gods, we recovered just over 18 feet of mud from the bottom of this lake. You may not be excited by this finding, but you should be, as we were giving each other high fives and could not have been happier.
It was a lot of hard work, imagine doing what we did on the video for a few hours (there was a 40 or so pound weight attached to the bottom of the ropes we were pulling up and down in the water to hammer the pipe deep into the mud. We can’t wait to split the cores open and see what we find inside. There is likely lots of tephra which is great to have. Tephra is the volcanic ash (which mostly turns to glass) that rains out after an eruption. Considering we are on an island with an active volcano, and many near by, there are lots of tephra deposits over the last several thousand years (the age of the mud we hope we’ve recovered). What is cool is that each eruption and each volcano has a unique signature (its chemical composition can be measured and vary from volcano to volcano). People have (and continue to) study this and relate them to eruptions from certain years, and can be a great asset when determining how old our mud is!
It is about 10:30 and the sun has finally gone down, it is time for bed. Another (hopefully) successful day of coring is ahead of us.
The next 3 pictures: top left: Adak suburbia, all the houses are the same! They were most likely built during the ramp up around the cold war time of the Reagan era (1980s). Top right: Heart Lake, our core site for the first two days.
Bottom pic: Close up of our lake with one of the volcanoes in the background. Note the yellow pontoon float, that was our base for coring!
Evening of July 24th
My hands are recovering from a wet, raw day in the field. The weather was promising as we loaded up the truck, with almost calm winds, and some high overcast clouds. But no sooner did we arrive at the lake did the rain drops start falling, and would stick around for the majority of the day. And to top it off the winds started to kick up. We really had gotten spoiled with a warm sunny first day in the field. But none the less, we boated back out to our site where our ‘banana boat’ as we called it was anchored from the night before and started debating about which new location to core. After some fun moving the raft (banana boat) around, we found a prime location. Of course here the water was only about 15 feet deep, and we had a tube that was 18 feet long, resulting in a bit of the tube extending up above water. Darrell and I took our turns attempting to push the tube down, stomp it down, and jump on it and hope our weight would push it down. Ultimately it worked, but it took a few times. Only 6 inches below the surface mud is a fairly thick (several inches) of tephra (that explosive material from a nearby volcano) which is never easy to core through. Once we were through that the tube really started to gain some depth, and we hammered it through almost 11 feet of mud.
Evening of July 25th
What a great day in the field we had. Really, you could not have asked for better weather. The wind was almost absent for the vast majority of the day, which led to very clam waters, easy to navigate and stabilize on when you are trying to core for lots of mud in 50 + foot deep water.
Our commute today was a bit longer than the last two as we were heading to a new lake, Andrew. It is up near the ‘restricted Parcel 4’ area of Adak, which is very prominently fenced off due to ‘live ordinances’. I suspect there were land mines, war heads and all other sorts of goodies left unaccounted for in this area that make it less than ideal for travel in. Conveniently, our launch site, which was home to a former recreation area (an old playground clearly built in the 80s, a building with a fireplace in it and restrooms, and an old dilapidated dock, was all located right next to the fenced off area. Anne also found a nice stream dirty with acid and rust stemming out into our nice lake.
Getting to the site was also another adventure, dealing with an old map and roads that were current at the time of publishing (presumably the 60s) are in varying states since then. Our trip out there was certainly bumpy, with huge pot holes and lots of brush. But have I mentioned the abundance of bald eagles here??? They are everywhere! Having never seen one up close before, I was amazed by how many we saw, sitting on poles, on the grass, pretty much everywhere. Well on our commute today we must have seen at least a dozen of them so we stopped for some great photo opportunities.
Anyways, we got the mud we wanted, and decided to call it a day (it was 6 PM after all and we had been up since 8). I think today was our earliest day though, typically we get home for dinner around 7-730. We have had such a successful trip (thanks in part due to the weather cooperating!) that we may run out of things to do! We are here until Thursday, so depending on what the weather brings us the next 3 days, we will attempt to retrieve another core from Andrew Lake, collect water samples for isotope analysis from a suite of lakes around the area, and maybe get adventurous and split the cores. It is certainly time for bed, its just past 10 and I am zonked.
I'll have more pictures in the AM if i get time, though the internet is slow here, and back in Anchorage Thursday night may be better!
Hey,thanks for posting this! We were wondering what you folks were doing. We learned something about the volcano's.
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