Yesterday, we had our last scheduled sampling session of the season. It was with a great sense of satisfaction that I pushed the tea-colored water from Imnavait weir through the cation filter, drop by drop, until at last, my arms trembling from exertion, I could cap that green taped 60mL CATS bottle for what I can only assume is the billionth time. And this time was the last time. I optimistically think, “Great! My days of lugging water from lake to lake are over!” I throw my arms up to the sky in celebration of the end of my filtering days, and that’s when Jason starts piling long pieces of plastic poles in my empty palms. Yep, no more water to lug, I’ll just be hauling equipment instead.

I have one week left, and though it will be free of sampling, it will not be lacking in things to do. As the final five remaining members of the lab, its our great pleasure to handle the herculean task of shutdown. The Arctic is lovely and hunky-dory now, but in a matter of weeks, conditions will harshen, and the population of camp will go from thirty to three. Thus our task until the end of the season is to prepare the lab space for a successful hibernation. Some things, like plastic nalgene bottles, syringes, and serum vials, are hardy enough to rough it through winter stacked in cardboard boxes on a shelf in the lab. Other things, like expensive electronics, pipettes, and certain chemicals, are a bit more high maintenance and need to be bundled up and packed in warm storage. The first stage of this process is to pull the equipment from the field back into the lab and sort everything by prospective storage area. The second stage involves cleaning, labeling, and inventorying… EVERYTHING. There are five of us responsible for shutting down the projects of four PIs, whose stuff is sprawled over three labs plus two storage areas. Oh, and all the stuff in the field.

Though we have been trying hard to stay organized, I cannot help but feel slightly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of stuff we have to deal with. Over a couple of days, we brought in the four Isco auto-samplers, which take water samples spaced between preset time intervals. You may remember what an Isco looks like from my pictures of the July 4^th Star Wars skit (hint: a spare Isco starred as R2D2). They have now taken over the Lab 4 floor space. I have also very happily spent an afternoon dumping all the nutrient samples and after which I very carefully placed the bags full of empty 125 mL bottles on top of the Iscos so as to keep a narrow corridor free of stuff for walking purposes. There’s stuff everywhere, under the lab, outside the door, and ever since Jason and I spent three hours Thursday afternoon beginning the daunting task of organizing the Conex storage shed, there’s a great mound of stuff piled outside the Conex which has now grown to such epic proportions that it merged with the pile outside Lab 4. And there’s more stuff coming in from the field every day.

On Monday we sampled lakes E5 and E6 jointly with the lakes group, and while we were there we took down the meteorological station and the drippers, which are pumps set on anchored floats that fertilize the lakes with a fortifying stew of nitrates. We spent the morning pulling up buckets of rocks and cement that served as anchors for the stations, and then towed them back to shore from the row boat, the stations floating along like large pets on the end of a leash. Aside from the couple of minutes it took for us to realize that the E5 dripper had a third anchor that we hadn’t noticed nor pulled up, which we subsequently realized was the explanation for why we weren’t getting any closer to shore despite Jason’s frantic rowing, the morning went by quite smoothly. We successfully got all the equipment on shore, stripped them of electronics, car batteries, and solar panels, and left the rest on the tundra for the winter.

So this next week will not be the relaxing time I had envisioned upon learning that we finish sampling a week before our departure date. But at least I can say with firm conviction that I have filtered my last* bottle! What joy!

*Correction: next-to-last bottle. Katie has just informed me that she needs to sample the Sag river on Wednesday. I should never have spoken with such conviction.  

Some people at Toolik upon the eve of their departure get to throw up their hands in mock despair and say, “Its going to be so weird going back home where it gets dark! I’ve totally forgotten what that’s like!”. To my great dismay, I will not be able to say that and really mean it, because every day I spend a couple of hours in… the DARK ROOM.

The dark room is the only place in camp where no light shines 24/7. We run two analyses in there, OPA for ammonia, and chlorophyll. A fluorometer works by shining a light on an object and detecting how much of the light the object reemits via flurescence. To do this, it needs to be in the dark. On top of that, the reagent for OPA is light sensitive, and chlorophyll needs to be kept in the dark all the time, both of which reinforce the unfortunate necessity of the dark room being, well, dark. As the newest member of the Kling team, I got the exciting assignment of running OPA. As Sara so nicely first described the process to me so as not to discourage me, “Its a little long… but you get to spend a lot of time in the dark room by yourself which is kinda nice”. What she really meant is, its mind-numbing drudgery that takes forever, and you get to spend most of it sitting by yourself in the dark listening to other people in the lab having fun. I’m exaggerating, its really not that bad, and getting some time alone is nice… at least that’s what I tell myself when I’m in the dark squinting at the fluorometer.

So what do you need to run OPA? First off you need the following, sample, working reagent, buffer solution, and standards. The buffer solution is a weaker version of the working reagent, and standards are solutions of known ammonia concentration. We use these to make a standard curve which is essential to calculate the concentration of ammonia in the samples. The principle is as follows. There no way to directly test for ammonia, so what we do is add a reagent called OPA to the samples, let the mix react for 16 to 24 hours, and then read the fluorescence off the fluorometer. Except that in addition to the samples that have straight working reagent added to them, we have two more sets of samples that are spiked with two volumes of highly concentrated standard, and another row of tubes to which is not added working reagent but buffer, which is a weaker solution of the working reagent. We do this for calculation reasons involving matrices. Feel confused? Me too.

Though I haven’t tried to understand the math surrounding the production of the actual values of ammonia, what I do understand is that OPA quadruples the time I have to spend with the fluorometer, because if I’m running a medium run of 30 samples, I actually have 120 tubes to rinse, pipette, shoot up, and read; plus 12 more for the standards. Its an ordeal. After returning from the field on Mondays, Wednesday, and Fridays, I’ll start the long process of preparing my tubes for OPA. In the dark room I rinse them with DI water and then buffer (~ 45 minutes), then I pipette my samples and standards in the common area of the lab (~ 90 minutes) then back to the dark room to shoot up, i.e. add OPA or buffer to the tubes (~ 45 minutes). Then the next day back to the dark room to read the samples (~ 2 hours).

I have spent so much time with the fluorometer I feel as though it is another person, a very needy and fickle person. It was not enough that three labs were battling over the precious time slots to spend at its side, it just HAD to break down half way through the summer. We yelled at it, threatened to throw it on the ground, but it didn’t listen. I guess it finally got its attention fix after a week and a half of being fawned over, taken apart, and settings readjusted, before finally deciding to work again. Of course at that point, our backlogs had accumulated so quickly that it didn’t even have to try to give us good data, we took whatever shoddy numbers it threw at us. What an unappreciative piece of equipment.

Sometimes Jason goes all misty eyed and says, “Well you know back in 08 when I ran OPA, we had to pipette the samples in the dark room on top of everything else. That was the woooooorst.” Very soon, I’ll be able to join that exclusive club of ex-OPAers. Sometimes when I’m alone squinting at the ever fluctuating values of the fluorometer I dream about the last time I’ll exit the dark room, stumbling around for a few seconds while my eyes get used to the brightness, and look back upon OPA as Jason does; with a wistful fondness and a sense of accomplishment from having gone a whole summer without throwing the fluorometer on the ground. Even once.    

I wrote this post last Sunday (June 17th), so its a little belated… woops.

On Thursday, I enjoyed the lovely drive up to Toolik. With me in the red truck were Dr. Byron Crump and his technician, Michelle. Dr. Crump is doing some fascinating research about the genetic variability of the microbial community in the lakes and streams around Toolik.

We started off on the highway after checking that the radio worked and hat the gas meter showed a full tank. The drive up took us 9 hours, but it passed by so quickly. I was so engrossed in looking out the window I got a stiff neck. For the first half of the trip, the landscape was dominated by extremely tall, scraggly spruce trees and light birch trees. The trees stretched on and over hills and mountains. The highway alternated between paved and dirt portions, but both were very well maintained. The only other vehicles we encountered on the road were huge trucks hurtling along waaaay faster than trucks that size should be allowed to go. I just kept on being surprised by how huge and empty everything was. There was just so much room and no people. The landscape was pretty homogeneous, the noticeable exception being crossing the Yukon River and the Brooks Range. Once we left the Brooks Range, the trees disappeared.

Interesting fact: the height of the trees in the Arctic is controlled by the depth of the permafrost. In the Arctic, the ground contains a thick layer of permafrost, which is soil that is permanently frozen all year round. The higher the latitude, the colder it is, and the closer to the surface the permafrost is, which makes the layer of soil in which the trees can take root thinner. Shorter roots mean shorter trees, and by the time we reach the tundra, the permafrost is so thick that those tall birch trees we saw earlier down the road were reduced to tiny birch bushes. The trees have no room to grow. And that’s why there are no trees in the tundra.

Once we reached the tundra it was only an hour or so before we were at Toolik field Station. The station has one central building which serves as dining hall and offices for the staff who run the station. Off to one side are living quarters, some boxy campervan style rooms, other tarpaulin domed weatherports. I’m living in the latter, on the Southern corner of camp. I’m alone for now, but I may get a roommate in the future. On the other side of camp are the labs, green rectangles lined up on the edge of the lake. My lab-group is separated between Lab 4, Wet Lab, and Dry Lab. I’m in Lab 4 and Wet Lab with Sara and the rest of the group (Byron, Michelle, Dustin, Jason, and Collin) are in Dry Lab. People mill about quite freely though. The lab space is shared with other groups so it can get quite crowded. Luckily Lab 4 is pretty free for now, but as the summer goes on, more people will arrive and it will get more cosy.

By the time we got to Toolik on Thursday, there was barely enough time for a quick orientation, settling in, and going to sleep. After breakfast on Friday, Sara, Dustin, and headed to Amnavait, a site about 10 minutes away by truck where we were scheduled to gather water and gas samples. It was a gorgeous day, blue sky and hot enough to wear tshirts. As this is a site that is sampled quite frequently, Toolik built a boardwalk from the road to the stream, which is very nice because walking on the tundra is no easy task. In most places, the ground is covered in a thick layer of moss or very springy earth, and whenever you take a step you sink down about 10 cm. Its a bit like walking on sand. So the boardwalk definitely speeded up the walk quite a lot.

The most basic things that I need to learn how to do is to take water and gas samples, and to filter the water samples in the field. The principle of filtering the samples is to fill a syringe with water and push the sample through a filter that is attached to the end of the syringe, and fill different bottles that are intended for different analyses. The filters are also collected and analyzed for particulate matter. It sounds easy in theory, but its a little difficult in practice. Firstly, its pretty time consuming with all the rinsing in between samples, and also there’s a lot of bottles to fill. But most importantly, its a little difficult to juggle everything with two hands while keeping everything as clean as possible. Its actually quite physical work, the easiest way to filter is to brace the syringe on your shoulder and hold the bottle between your knees. Sara showed me her bruises from filtering, it looks pretty brutal. Sadly, I can feel some coming on already. Taking gas samples is a little bit trickier, as it involves transferring air from one syringe to another. There’s a lot of balance involved. I find that difficult. Mostly I’m concentrating on not spilling the water all over the place.

Can’t wait to see what next week has in store!!