After the long, but scenic, journey up the Dalton Highway from Fairbanks on the 28th of June, the 2017 field season has officially begun for the lake warming team up at Toolik Field Station. After spending my first two weeks at Toolik this past May for the annual LTER ice-fishing sampling, it is incredible how much the landscape has changed in that time. During Mid-May the slopes and valleys were laced with snow with the occasional brown spots sprinkled in while the lakes were covered by ~5-6 feet of ice. However, the snow on the north slope has disappeared allowing for the lush mosses, flowers, and shrubs to show their true colors resulting in a gorgeous pallet of greens with dashes of purples, pinks, and yellows. More importantly, the Fog lakes are now ice-free. Pictures (from our field cameras deployed at each lake) show the first ice-free days of the year for each of our lovely, photogenic lakes. Thus, “growing season” has officially commenced for all of the inhabitants of the Fog lakes, exciting times indeed!
Although the act of warming the lakes will not begin until mid-July, there are plenty of tasks for my REU (Thomas Hafen) and I to accomplish before the warming begins and we have wasted no time in getting to it! First steps included downloading the temperature loggers that have been in the lakes over winter. Also, we installed new, more user-friendly chains (hanging from surface to the bottom) with an increased number of HOBO loggers attached for high resolution sampling of the water column temperatures. In addition, dissolved oxygen probes logging every 10 min have been deployed on these chains and wind sensors/weather stations have been added to each of the Fog lakes as well. All of these deployments will be giving us crucial high frequency data that will be useful in monitoring some of the physical effects associated with our lake warming manipulations. Another exciting note, some of our lake warming equipment has arrived to TFS after a long trek up the haul road, including the massive SolarBee® and some heat pumps. More arrivals for the lake warming team occurred this past week, including Co-PI Anne Giblin and MBL Tech Kristen Rathbun; great to have them on-site! Plans for the following week include benthic sampling (Arctic Char love the snails!) with a newly revamped protocol. We also plan to do some fishing (finally!) on the lakes along the inlet to Toolik Lake (I-Lakes) as a part of our standard LTER fish sampling. Thanks for reading my first blog post and be sure to stay tuned for the next post as our adventures continue on the North Slope of the Brooks Range!
1 Comment
Terry Jeffers
7/3/2017 05:42:10 am
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Author:
Nick Barrett- PhD student on Arctic Lake Warming project Check out my personal Twitter page for various tweets about the project: @WaterWorks_NB |