Sunday, June 28, 2009

Ms. Lerenman in the Arctic Day 9

Weighing and inputting spruce needle data before going out for beluga whale watching. I am measuring the weight to a thousandth of a gram.
Some of us successfully got pictures of the beluga whales. I'll be borrowing those pictures in the future.
The other Zodiac boat avoiding a glacier bit.
Earthwatchers on floating ice! We are all wearing about eight layers of clothes here as the wind was below freezing here. We went all the way up to Nunavut, the uppermost Arctic Canada province or territory during our outing. It is occupied by mostly native Inuits.
Captain Cam explains the various formations on the large piece of floating ice that we are miraculously standing on and not falling through.
While we were on the ice floe, Laura and Will decide to drink out of the melted part of the floating ice. Apparently, it's the best tasting water ever...so fresh and so clean!
Our new Belgian friends on the boat with us.
Dr. Kershaw gives a thirty minute lecture on permafrost to our unwitting Captain Cam on the Zodiac beluga whale watching boat.
The "Miss Piggy" plane crash. The logo is an upside down question mark. Not the most safety ensuring logo that I can think of.

Today was a monumental day for us. We got to go beluga whale watching on an awesome Zodiac boat and we saw Merry Bay and finished our last GPR site in the Arctic ever! We finished a 75 meter transect in a record 30 minutes. Our first one took us about an hour and a half, so we have really improved over the past week. We also got to see a really strange cargo plane that had crashed thirty years ago and had bullet holes in it. Both pilots survived unscathed.

1 comment:

dchan said...

why were there bullet holes in that plane? did the inuits shoot it down?