Dr Matt Nolan -- UAF

01-02 July 08 (Day 71-72): The chaos begins
After our first night’s sleep in a bed, the anticipated chaos associated with our major lidar campaign began. Nick and Jessica from Aerometric showed up in the morning in their Piper Navajo equipped with their lidar unit. The lidar is essentially a laser beam that sweeps left to right as they fly forward, measuring the distance to the ground along a swath determined by the sweep angle of the lidar. In our case, this swath is a few kilometers wide by the time it reaches the ground from 12,000 feet. As they fly, a GPS unit in the plane is used to determine their position, corrected by the ground-based GPS we deployed in the field the day before. We also deployed a few more GPS here in Kaktovik to improve these corrections and give them some preliminary data to use to ensure the day’s acquisitions worked well, since we are only able to check the GPS on the tundra every week or so because they are so far away. We scoped out a number of locations in town and eventually settled on two convenient ones. Unfortunately the weather was not good enough to start actual work today. We need clear skies up to about 13,000 feet.

Nick fires up the Navajo for a first attempt, while Jessica sits in the back and make sure the data is coming in.

The weather seemed better further west, however, and Aerometric had another project lined up, so they took off in the afternoon to see if they could squeeze that project in. Unfortunately during that project, their laptop got fried somehow, and they then discovered that their backup laptop didn’t have all of the necessary software on it. Things got progressively worse, as this was a Canadian national holiday (no joke!), and the software they needed had to come from a Canadian company. So they spent the night in Deadhorse since they were closer to there and the internet was more reliable.

Today they were able to download the software in Deadhorse, but the weather here was still not cooperating. They came back briefly to get their personal things, but decided to spend the next day in Deadhorse. Another Aerometric plane was there and it was broken, so a mechanic was coming in the next day to fix that and they figured this was a good opportunity to also take care of some routine timed maintenance on their plane so that they would not get caught needing to do it in the middle of good weather for our project.

In the meantime here, we began settling into a routine in Kaktovik and sorting out other aspects of the project. Tom the pilot still had not returned, so one major task was to begin trying to line up other aircraft to help us with the aerial photography and GPS work we needed to do. Benny, a professional photography helping us out, is due to arrive in a few days so we wanted to be sure to have several options lined up. In any case, this is the type of chaos that we anticipated and the reason we were here.

I love Kaktovik. Where else can you offload a 4 wheeler into a loader and climb up into the cockpit to get a photo of it?

03 July 08 (Day 73): Our first injury of the trip
Our first serious injury of the trip occurred today. People often ask me about the risks associated with working in the remote field, and my contention has always been that it is safer there than in civilization. In the field, the situation is simple – we need to be concerned about weather, animals and glacier travel, plus a few things associated with camp life like tent stability and stove safety. But in civilization, there are countless potential risks – things associated with vehicles, buildings, fuels, people, etc etc. In this case, we spent the late afternoon helping Walt shuttle passengers to the airport. The weather was marginal and not good enough to land, so we stayed down at the strip encouraging the Frontier pilot circling overhead to hang out to the last possible minute as it seemed to be improving. On his last pass, the automated FAA instruments on the runway finally read above minimums, and the plane landed and scooped up the hikers eager to get back to their homes. On the way back, driving the school bus about 5 mph, we hit a pothole which launched Turner out of his seat. He landed on the wheel well, which sliced the back of his head open. It was just Kristin, Turner and I on the bus. Kristin scooped him up and realized immediately that he was bleeding profusely. As we were already on Walt’s driveway, I ran into the hotel long enough to get some dish towels and tell them to call the clinic and let them know we were headed over there to get Turner some stitches.

It was already 6PM, but the clinic crew and rescue squad showed up within a few minutes to open the clinic and help us out. By this time Turner was calm and quiet, but our dish towels and Kristin were soaked with blood. We had a look at this head, and there was a deep gash there about 2 inches long. The bleeding had nearly stopped by now, and we spent the next hour or so just flushing it with water. We dug up some toys for Turner, and soon he was running around again playing with them as we took care of some paperwork and let his anesthesia kicked in. Putting the stitches in went reasonably well. He didn’t feel the needle, but didn’t like being held still. To keep the bandages attached, we had to shave a circle around the cut, but his long hair mostly covered the gap. But the bald spot still looked a little like Frankenstein, but the local help was great and we were really glad of the help.

Turner was pretty quiet at first, never really having an owwie this large before.

We called these “red owwies” after this. Note that he put on a white shirt this morning. Head wounds, as I learned, gush blood at first.

He’s apparently a tough little monkey, and was soon playing with toys as the anesthesia kicked in.

It wasn’t getting the stitches that bothered him, but us keeping his head still and preventing him from playing with the animals.

Turner: “The best thing to do after falling off a school bus is to climb back on…”

Injuries do happen, but I’ll be glad to get back into the field were I’m even more convinced that the risks are lower. What’s really different about the field is that there are no clinics or hospitals or rescue crews – to get such help requires a comparatively enormously larger logistical mobilization. But is this a risk? I don’t see it that way. The risks are the things that can hurt us, and in the field these are things we can largely identify and prepare for. What we cannot prepare for are humans -- the two leading causes of death for children are auto accidents and murder, for example. Fifty thousand people per year die from car accident, most with no fault assigned during commutes to work, yet somehow these kind of statistics somehow just become part of the background noise our society considered acceptable. Comparatively deaths and injuries in ANWR are rare, even on a percentage basis. There is simply much less opportunity for the risks that we take for granted in civilization, things essentially random as the goings-on for humans are essentially unpredicatable. Things like Turner’s red owwie are predictable, and had any of us got a gash like this in the field, we likely would have stitched it up ourselves using the medical supplies we brought for this, but much worse than this and we likely would have called in the calvalry using the arsenal of comms equipment we have with us. Being safe in the wild of course puts the burden on us to avert problems rather than counting on others to obey the laws set up for community safety, but in my mind this a worthwhile tradeoff, and our small and statistically invalid data set of the past few months confirms this.

04 July 08 (Day 74): Celebrating Independence Day and a bit of lidar success
I was up at 4:30AM to check weather, which was nearly perfect, and I checked in with Jessica and Nick to let them know that today could be our day. We only need about 3 days of this weather to complete the project, and in one day we could gather our most essential data. They arrived from Deadhorse about 7AM and we quickly redployed the ground-based GPS. I sat in the truck as they taxied off, waiting around to get a picture of them taking off with the background of mountains. But they never took off. I called them on the radio and they said they were having issues with the lidar. So they came back to the ramp and we fooled around with things a bit more. I unplugged their antenna going to the top of the plane and plugged it back in, and about this time the unit came alive again. So they taxied back out, and this time they took off. I headed back to Waldo’s for some breakfast, but by the time I was finished, the plane flew overhead and landed at the runway. It was broken again. In the air, they had talked with the manufacturer and decided to head back to Anchorage where a technician from Canada would meet them in a few days to troubleshoot the complicated system. So despite the rare and perfect weather, today would not be the day to complete the work started 50 years ago and attempted many times since. I’m not one to believe in curses, but every mapping project attempted out here since the first in 1957 has failed, and it was certainly beginning to look like our work might end up as another footnote in the long list of failed attempts.

Nick untangles the antenna cables as Jessica lines up the tripod over a temporary marker, in Waldo’s backyard.

The laser sits inside the box in the foreground, where it is mounted into a hole in the floor so it can see the ground. The control electronics are in front of the seat in the middle-ground where Jessica sits.

It being July 4th, Kaktovik had some festivities lined up. No official fireworks, but lots of local color and kids for the games. So we spent some time in town and met with the locals. All of the hikers and tourists were shipped off yesterday, so we were the only outsiders there. I find it a bit interesting that it’s the tourists who take a real interest in our work. A conversation about glaciers with them can take several hours. Not so much the locals. The typical question of ‘So are the glaciers still melting?’ gets answered ‘Yep, faster every time we look’ and suffices in most cases. So it was kind of a day off for me, with no schpeeling and no lidar. I took a long nap with Turner in the afternoon, and started sorting some gear after a nice dinner.

Turner pumps some fluids into himself after a grueling foot race in the 2-3 year old age bracket.

As I was settling in for the evening, however, I got a call from Jessica. They were now in Bettles. On the way to Anchorage, they decided to stop in Bettles to attempt a small job there and see if any of the fiddling they were doing in the plane may have worked. As it turned out, it did – the system was now fully functional. Such things scare me a bit, as they had not clearly identified the problem. In my experience in geophysics the past 20 years, such intermittent problems are almost always caused by loose or bad connections with the cables. I don’t know if my jiggling of the GPS antenna cable solved the problem in the morning or not, but my guess is that it is something along these lines. In any case, the plane is that they are going to head over at 6AM tomorrow. The weather still seems stable here, so we’re keeping our fingers crossed, both for weather and for system stability. Benny also arrives tomorrow. He’s never been to Alaska before, let along the remote Arctic, so it’s shaping up to be a busy and interesting day.

05-07 July 08 (Day 75-77): Lidar success!
After 50 years of attempts, a high resolution map of McCall Glacier may have just been acquired. During the International Geophysical Year 1957-58, eight glaciers in Alaska were selected for long-term research. A primary component of this research was the use of topographic maps – by making such maps periodically, the evolution of the shape of the glacier could be tracked and its dynamics better understood. McCall Glacier was the centerpiece of this research and the only glacier of the eight where a major field program was established. As such, the first tests in making topographic maps were done there as that is where it would be most useful to the field team. Unfortunately, circumstances prevented the mapping team’s return to McCall Glacier, and all that we were left with is a map made with an uncalibrated lens, which is essentially unusable for research purposes. Mapping efforts again were made in the early 1970s, but failed for other reasons. So all that we have is the coarse-scale USGS map made in 1956, and these maps are notorious for errors, especially in the Far North and on glaciers. Without good maps, it’s hard to do any type of modeling and hard to make many types of measurements of change. Now we are one step closer to having an accurate and up-to-date map.

The weather in the mountains has been troublesome, but at least sufficient for some work to get done. The dynamic there is what we’ve observed while in the mountains – by early morning on clear day, the sun evaporates moisture from the glaciers and rivers and lifts it high into the sky, creating clouds and sometimes thunderheads. So basically by about 10AM, we cant do any lidar in the mountains. So the first day back, Nick and Jessica flew the river corridors along the coastal plain, where it was still nice. The next day we were up at about 4AM -- when the clouds from the day before have settled down but the new ones have not yet started up – and were able to fly a square around McCall Glacier, our highest priority target, for a few hours. This morning we employed the same early-morning trick and were able to get 8 of the 35 long east-west flight lines done. So it seems that all we need is another 12 hours of clear weather and we could knock out the remaining work, but getting those 12 hours might take 12 weeks…

McCall Glacier is just to the right of the high peak in the center of the photo, as seen from the runway in Kaktovik.

The locals do a lot of hunting. The caribou have been wandering around on the island lately, and it often sounds like Iraq around here. Lawrence had too much and was giving the meat away.

Benny and I took a walk one night down to the bonepile. The locals hunt whales in fall, then leave the carcasses on the beach for the bears to eat. It makes for interesting photos, but next time I want to use my tower mount to get a panoramic view looking down on the pile.

08 July 08 (Day 78): High-resolution aerial photography
Benny arrived from LA a few days ago and today we went on our first photo flight. Benny is a professional photographer and specializes in aerial photography. He brought with him several high-powered cameras and helped me figure out how to use the one I bought from him on ebay. My camera uses 5 inch wide negative film to take 4”x5” photos, compared to 35mm film which is less than 1” squared. One of Benny’s cameras takes 8”x10” photos. He built this camera himself, machining it out of a solid block of aluminum to be lightweight and aerodynamic. Another camera has 39 megapixel resolution, compared to my high-end Nikon which has only 12 megapixels, and it also has 12 stop dynamic range, which greatly exceeds a digital Nikon at about 6 and even black and white film at 10. So we looked forward to getting some high-resolution photos of the glaciers here within their mountain settings, both as a scientific record of their extents and to aid with interpretations of the new topographic map made with lidar.

The weather today unfortunately took a turn for the worse. Unlike the previous several days, the clouds never settled down at night and it was a clear that a new weather system was moving in. So lidar was shut down. But we had already scheduled Dirk to come in from Coldfoot and really our primary focus of this trip was to collect some GPS ground control for the lidar, and this still seemed possible. So we loaded up the plane with camera and GPS gear and headed off.

Our first stop was McCall Glacier. Before the weather got any worse, I wanted to see whether it would be possible to land there directly on the ice. Jason was ready on the ground to flag out the area he thought best. Unfortunately the snow hadn’t completely cleared and conditions weren’t suitable for landing. We still had some food and gear with us for the glacier crew, so we ended up dropping it to them. Most stuff survived, but we learned a few things about packaging. After this we headed off to take a few pictures.

Though we traveled through a few showers, in general the weather was fine for photography and we spent some time in the upper Jago and Okpilak valleys. Benny sat in the back and shot out of the open door, while I was in front shooting out of the open window. Shooting with the 8x10 camera is a challenge. After each shot, the film has to be removed and replaced with another sheet. A few days earlier we had preloaded a bunch of film into holders, which must be done in complete darkness. Given the 24 hour daylight here, this required use of a “dark tent” specially made for this purpose. Another challenge in the air is that the wind wants to rip the film out of your hand; fortunately this never occurred here, but Benny had some stories about this from previous experience and came up with a system to prevent it from happening again. In any case, in about 30 minutes we saw a lot of nice scenery and were able to capture many glaciers. We didn’t linger too long here as the weather was threatening and we still had GPS work to do.

The boxes were really packaged for air dropping, and suffered a little damage...

The GPS work went well, though I did get a bit wet. Our first stop was the mid-Jago strip where we deployed the base station a week earlier. The others decided to wait in the plane has a thunderstorm passed over us, also making me a little nervous walking around with an antenna on my back as lightening crackled within the valley. But I didn’t get fried while collecting the ground points and the base station was still in good shape. Next we went to the Bitty strip, where we began our hike last year. The weather here was better, but bugs were out in medium force, and I don’t think Benny believed us when we said that they get much worse that this. But within an hour we had collected a bunch of points and we were on our way back to Kaktovik having successfully completed our missions. I think Benny was happiest of all, as he had never been to Alaska or the Arctic before, and this was a pretty spectaclar up-close-and-personal visit to some of the most remote and beautiful scenery in the country. It remains to be seen whether any of our films exposed correctly or not, but the digital cameras seemed to hold out.

09-11 July 2008 (Day 79-81): Return to civilization
Given that the weather was not improving and that Nick and Jessica had the Kaktovik scene figured out, we decided to head back to civilization a bit earlier. We had begun settling into Kaktovik life pretty well and enjoyed our visits with the neighbors and the chaos of Waldos, but the list of things to do to prepare for the next phase of the trip began growing longer and longer the more we thought about it, and the list of productive things to do in Kaktovik was getting pretty short. So once Turner got his stitches out, we switched our reservations and headed back to town.

Huge snowfences surround the infrastructure of Kaktovik. These fences slow down the blowing snow, helping it accumulate behind them rather than behind all of the buildings in town.

Fairbanks hadn’t changed much, but there was a lot more green and trees around than we were used to. Our house survived, but had been inhabited by voles and ants during our absence, causing an unpleasant mess. We made the mistake of dropping off our stuff at the house before going out for dinner – Turner was very happy to find all of his toys here, but very unhappy to be taken away from them again 10 minutes later. But just as quickly he was happy again to be running around on the deck of the Pump House and throwing rocks in the river. A few hours later we were all asleep in our own beds again, for the first time in about 3 months. And it felt good.

The next day, Friday, I spent with Benny, showing him the sights around the University and trying to explain the Fairbanks lifestyle to him. We toured the museum, showed him my office/closet, ate at Lemongrass, and took a look at Fairbanks architecture. Dinner was a simple pizza and beer meal at our house, eliminating the need for Kristin and I to play tag team chasing Turner around a restaurant. Next day we ate a nice lunch at Pikes before dropping Benny off at the airport. It was a great visit with him and I learned a lot about high-end photography and I think Benny learned a few things about Alaska too. I think we’re both looking forward to continued collaborations.

12-13 July 2008 (Day 82-83): Settling into civilization
With Benny gone and our next departure still a week away, we had a brief lull to remember what summer in Fairbanks is like. We also caught up a bit with a few old friends and Turner had the chance to visit with his friends too. In between we shopped for food for the next phase of the trip (about 160 man-days worth) and began considering how to package this for air-drops. I stitched a few of my high resolution panoramas – composed of 300 to 500 shots each – and was relieved to learn that they stitched beautifully for the most part. I’ll try to upload them in the next week, but they are multi-gigabyte files and I may not have the chance.

Jason and Joey seem to be doing well on the glacier. They’ve been busy at the terminus and also on the glacier doing mass balance and velocity surveys. They also reported seeing a black wolf on the glacier. Jason was up early to take advantage of the hard snow, but noticed him loping up towards the lower cirque where he was planning to go. But rather than go up and over Bravo Pass, he turned around and found a nice big rock near the stream at the confluence to take a nap on. Apparently it was a bright sunny day, and he zonked out for several hours. Jason decided to leave him be until he woke up on his own, but eventually the need to get some work done was too great to ignore and they tried to sneak around him on their way to the lower cirque. Despite their care, the wolf detected them and attacked viciously. Jason’s left arm was nearly ripped off, and when Joey tried to help, he went for her jugular. Actually, the satellite phone call was a little garbled, and it could be that he just ran off, up and over the middle cirque. But then my new favorite TV show began and I had to hung up before I could clear the confusion.

He was just a little guy. Once he woke up, he hiked up to the upper cirque and disappeared down another valley.

14-16 July 2008 (Day 84-86): Press releases gives McCall Glacier another 15 minutes of fame
The past few days for me have been consumed by a press release that UAF sent out describing our ice coring success. I had written a draft of the release several weeks earlier and sent it out to our UAF public information office on our arrival in Kaktovik, but it took some time to work through the system and go through a few iterations. Here is a link to the initial release: http://www.uaf.edu/news/headlines/20080710130436.html.

Much of the time related to this got soaked up getting photos ready. I had prepared a bunch the week before, but then I was told we needed model release forms from everyone in the photos. Of course nearly all my photos have people in them, and most of these people are hard to get hold off in summer. So then I had to sort through to find photos that didn’t have people in them. I also wanted to stitch a few more panoramas that were related to the drilling, and this took more time. Then we had a teleconference with the press which lasted several hours, after which many of them called me back to talk one on one, including a radio interview.

The next day, this article appeared in the Anchorage paper: http://www.adn.com/626/story/465838.html. What I found most interesting about this article was actually the comments people left in the online version. Most of them were of the form “This is a waste of our tax money” and “This is just another attempt by evil scientists to convince of the hoax of climate change”. I was quite surprised.

The next day the local TV station joined us at the Ice Museum where the cores are being stored. We found the boxes sitting in the cold room where they give carving demonstrations. Everything looked like it was in good shape fortunately, and the tourists milling about were excited to see the cores. The interviews went reasonably well I think, and later that night the story appeared on TV.

The ice was fine in the cold room, but the camera operators were happy to get back outside where it was warmer.

This morning, the entire Nolan family made the front page of the Fairbanks paper, as well as the highlight story of the IPY site, thanks to Stefan. The day before our press people had given me a list of photos from my blog that they liked, and one of them was a pretty picture taken from the Hut with Kristin and Turner overlooking the glacier towards Bur Cirque. I never expected this picture to be used since it has nothing to do with the drilling, but it appeared smack in the middle of the front page, along with a smaller photo of me shpeeling while holding a core in my hands in the museum. http://newsminer.com/news/2008/jul/16/ice-samples-anwr-glacier-give-scientists-look-arct/
What I found most interesting about this article again were the comments. This time there were fewer irrational ones and more either funny ones or more comments beating up on the idiot comments. I guess that’s why I live in Fairbanks.

What I found interesting is the differences and similarities between the two articles. Neither article overplayed the climate change angle or even mentioned the issue of whether the current changes were influenced by humans, despite the way many of the commenters read it, and neither took anything out of context or tried to steer the implications to suit their own agendas, which was nice. The big difference I found was that the Anchorage paper felt they needed a bigger hook than the real story itself – their lead was essentially ‘drilling has begun in ANWR’ – whereas the Fairbanks paper thought the cores were interesting on their own. After reading both stories and their comments, I was left wondering which came first – idiot readers or reporters that think their readers need shock-and-awe in every bit of news. Maybe it’s got something to do with the size difference between the cities, and their being more competition in a variety of ways in the larger and denser locations, and this process simply gets worse in real cities in the south. The Sitka newspaper, for example, just reprinted our press release verbatim http://www.sitnews.us/0708news/071608/071608_mccall.html. In any case, it seems to me that there is some relation between city size, what is considered news, and the type of people that read it, but I’m not exactly sure what that relationship is.

PS If anyone comes across links to this story in your local newspaper or radio, please share them in the comment section of this blog – thanks.

17-18 July 2008 (Day 87-88): Same song, different station
Packing seems to have become a major component of our lifestyle. Our house is mostly one big room which seems to spend most of its time full with piles of gear in some stage of being packed or unpacked. Right now we’re packing for three trips – we leave for Colorado tonight for a week, we leave for a backpacking trip into the glacier a few days after we return, and we have 5 weeks on the glacier after that. The glacier portion is the most work to prepare for, as we’re packing this with the plan of dropping it down to the glacier from the plane, in case the plane is unable to land on the ice. So everything has to be packaged to survive a drop of 100 feet and a crash landing at 50 mph. I have no prior experience at air drops, so this is sure to be a learning experience. Fortunately its all just food, no expensive electronics or gear.

Another thing that has been consuming a lot of my time are phone calls and meetings to keep the project moving forward. I had planned to do a bunch of repairs on the house while here, but I haven’t really come close to having this make it to the top of the list. My experience with field work has led me to believe that success in the field is really all about chasing the details and having contingency plans, and this simply requires a lot of time. I tend to take the Colin Powell approach in general – have a clear goal, go in with overwhelming power, and have a clear exit strategy. The real challenge comes in deciding which details are most important to chase first, because there’s simply not enough time to do everything and the logistical landscape shifts so much that you can waste a lot of time working one angle only to find that one of the elements not in your control has changed significantly. So flexibility is a key.

Phone calls and meetings don’t lend themselves well to photography, but I can paint a quick picture of the issues with words:
- Jason and Joey need to get picked up and taken back to Kaktovik in about a week
- Jason needs to meet up with the US Fish and Wildlife on the lower Hula Hula river after this
- The FWS team needs some help in Fairbanks with planning their stream monitoring to tie in with ours
- We need to get our GPS data from the McCall base station back to civilization
- We need to get 4 people from Kentucky and Mississippi to the glacier in late July
- We need to get a lot of food onto the glacier about the same time as the people without landing on the glacier, but without dropping the food when no one is there, and hopefully without having to pay for two ferry flights
- We need to remove about a ton of stuff from the glacier and get it back to civilization in late August, without landing a plane there.
- We need to do all this at the lowest possible cost so we don’t blow our budget further.
- My budget is currently $50k in the hole, because in spring I reallocated my entire science budget to pay for the lidar and NSF was supposed to pay me back for this, which they haven’t yet, and my business office would prefer I not spend any money until the deficit is cleared up.

So in between vacuum sealing rice, wrapping Tang in bubble wrap, and playing dinosaur with Turner, we’re trying to sort out these logistics. But in a few hours we’re headed to Colorado for a week-long family reunion on Kristin’s mother’s side, and its time to begin thinking about packing for that…

July 19-26 (Day 89-96): And now for something completely different
Having spent nearly a week in the civilization of Fairbanks, we spent the next week in Estes Park, Colorado, at a family reunion on Kristin’s mother’s side. Fortunately for us, we were not in all crammed into a giant hotel metropolis, but rather each had individual cabins (with running water!) spread over several acres of hillside. During the day, there was time for hikes or small adventures, and the evenings were spent mostly with BBQs at someone’s cabin. The hiking was all on nice, well-groomed trails where folks could walk side-by-side, which was a welcomed and unusual change from tussocks and muddy caribou trails. There were several glaciers noted on the maps, and one day we all headed towards the one that the ranger said was the most scenic. Unless we hiked the wrong trail, the ‘glacier’ turned out to be a couple of small snow patches in the shadows of a steep face, but it was still enjoyable to visit, as well as to contemplate what McCall Valley will look like 50 years from now. During the trip I was of course in contact with our companions in the field and those about to arrive, as once we returned we would be in full swing field prep mode.

Isn't wasnt long before Turner had enough of civilization and was ready to head back.

Meanwhile back on the glacier, Jason and Joey continued working at the ice, streams, and tundra. One task we wanted to try out was sampling the rocks for diatoms along various stream transects, as a means to assess water quality and variations in it. Diatoms come in many shapes and sizes, and each has it own preferred habitat. So by surveying what's living where, we can get a sense of how the conditions in the water vary. The basic idea behind sampling is to grab some suitable rocks and scrub off the diatoms, which are too small to see, with a toothbrush into a small jar for storage and later analysis. They also took a few days off for some hiking in the Jago River area, saw tons of caribou and even more mosquitos.