13 August, 1997

August 13, 1997

What a day. I buildt two probes that check temperature at permafrost, 5 cm, 10 cm, 15 cm, and 20 cm. One probe was assembled on the way to the sites 3 and 4 the other was done last night. Jeremy launched the loggers with SUNY's IBM and we drove an hour and a half to the sites. There we had a bit of good luck, the helocopter was able to get arround the fog and rain to lift Anna into site 3 and Jeremy and me in to site 4. Anna and Jeremy sampled with the probes that I put togather and I sampled with the old thermister probe so that we would have matching datta for a comparison.

We had no luck in getting a lift out of the sites. (Anna had about a mile walk and Jeremy and I walked 1.6 mi out.) The walks are not that easy to do because of the tussocks, which look like you could walk on the top of them, and a stream that was high because of the last few days of rain. Anna made it out rather quickly because of a possible bear working its way toward her and picked us up with the truck. The three of us were in contact with each other by radio so timing our meeting did not take too much trouble. Incidentally, we thought that we would have to navigate out in the fog but about 10 min. After the chopper left the sky cleared part way and we could see the Haul Road again whic removed one problem. It is hard for anyone who lives in the lower 48 to imagine a condition where there is only one road and if you go in the wrong direction, you will miss that one road.

We got back to toolik late and went into the lab to check our loggers and that is when we found out that the computer we had been using to launch the loggers at all the sites had a problem with date and time. The computer thought it was July 19 not August 13. Since the loggers are told what day and time to start, if the computer gives them the wrong start time, they will not collect data when expected. Our whole set of measurements was useless because the loggers thought that they should start at 2:00 pm in 25 days not 1400 hours today. The discovery of this glitch means that we have to revisit every site that was launched with the computer that had the wrong date and time. Jerry is going out yet tonight to get one site and tomorrow we will hit the others. Turns out to be a good thing that the temperature probing experiment failed.

Good night.