I’ll be taking off for Barrow in just a few hours, the last field effort of my dissertation – and my last chance at collecting frost flowers! This will be my 6th trip up in the last four years, although two of those trips were pretty short, when conditions made work impossible or impractical. Here’s a short photo summary of our previous Barrow efforts.
April, 2009. My first time working on sea ice, and our first frost flower samples that made it into a publication (Bowman and Deming, GRL, 2010). Many thanks to Hans-Werner Jacobi and Florent Domine for the invitation to participate in their field effort.
Our first serious, NSF funded effort to look at the microbiology of frost flowers, in February, 2010. This was a difficult trip, dominated by pretty extreme weather. There was no open water anywhere, and whenever we tried to open an artificial plot to grow frost flowers it would quickly be covered by blowing snow. A major blizzard pinned us down towards the end of the trip, the airport was closed for days and the road from the research station to town became impassible. At one point, with our truck stuck in a snowdrift, my lab mate Jesse and I watched snow drifts build around the truck faster than we could dig them down (we eventually abandoned the truck, fortunately we weren’t too far from the station).
Following our failed effort in February of 2010, we received an email in April that natural frost flowers were forming. I went up the next day and sampled from this lead, these are the samples in our 2013 paper (Bowman et al., EMIR, 2013). That night it snowed a foot, eradicating all frost flowers. If I’d been a day later I would have missed them.
2011, another tough year. Ice conditions that winter were extreme, and the whaling crews were having a very difficult time cutting trails through the landfast ice. I went up in March, which turned out to be much too early, and spent several frustrating days searching for a path out to the lead. We covered a lot of ground and found nothing other than these (very blurry) polar bears!
After a few days of searching I went home, and came back in April after the ice conditions had improved. This massive wall of ice shows how bad the weather was that year. It’s a pressure ridge created by the wind stacking pans of ice on top of one another, then sheared in half by a major storm. We did end up finding frost flowers, sort of. Everything was just weird that year. No new frost flowers were growing where we could reach them (the wind keep blowing them to places we couldn’t go), and the ones we could reach were very low in salinity.
So there we are… three field seasons over four years, five trips, and two publications (we are working on a third from the 2010 samples, the metagenomics project that I’ve written about here). I’ve been nervously watching the weather for the last few days and am cautiously optimistic. Right now it’s pretty warm (18F/-8C) and snowing lightly, not good, but tomorrow it should be cold and precipitation free. I’d really like to find some week-old frost flowers, which isn’t going to happen with today’s snow, but the chances of finding new ones are good.
I’m really interested in connecting the unexpected microbial community that we observed in 2010 to the wider environment however, which means that even if I don’t find frost flowers this field season can be a success. I’ll be sampling open water, young sea ice, and even lake water (working with colleagues on a NASA project who will arrive a few days after me) – environments that are much less dependent on conditions than frost flowers!
