by Gabriela Schaepman-Strub
Kytalyk, July 7, 2013
It’s really windy today with a few raindrops in between. To give some rest to my healing ankle I am only doing one outdoor shift a day, reducing the hours of leg-breaking tundra walking. On days like these I am quite lucky with my fate… On the other hand these extra quiet hours back in the house allow me to plan ahead and also think about most basic infrastructure that is urgently needed for doing our research. The transfer from the boat to the research station this year has not become easier. One evening we fixed a few meters of the boardwalk leading from the river side to the houses through a wet sedge area with standing water, could not get my feet out of the mud, ending up sitting in the mud …. It is quite cold in the big house as I am typing this text. Curtains are moving from the wind that is entering through the walls and open slits of the window frames. The chair I am sitting on is the best one remaining, the one Angela Erb has been breaking on her first field day last year ended as fire wood.
View of the boardwalk leading from the river bank to the houses (Photo: G. Schaepman-Strub, July 2013).
Infrastructure of the ‘big house’ looks cozy on the picture, but the wind is blowing through the walls and window frames, the stove is not strong enough to heat up the sleeping rooms and chairs definitely arrived at the end of their life cycle (Photo: G. Schaepman-Strub, July 2013).
As long as fresh water bucket gets filled and waste water bucket emptied… We even got soap and a towel for cleaning this year :-). The rest of the porch can be used as laboratory since a German group made it mosquito-safe two years ago.
Main location for personal and group hygiene (Photo: G. Schaepman-Strub, July 2013).
On the other hand every year brings a few important improvements. In earlier years operation system messages popping up such as ‘please contact XXX for software update’ often meant the end of the data record for the season. This year, our colleagues brought a new communication system relying on geostationary satellites that provides more continuous and reliable connectivity, as well as the possibility to send and receive emails. A real improvement, thanks so much to Ko for arranging and sharing it! Otherwise this blog was not possible at all…With so many electronic devices charging of batteries remains an issue. This year there is a new fuel generator (yes, the ones from Japan indeed seem to be better than the cheap ones made in China, even Bingxi agrees on this!), but the diesel generator to run the closed-path methane measurement system broke last year and the new one is still somewhere, but definitely not on the site. To be independent from fuel we plan to invest into a windmill system that should be shipped later on this year. Given the potential fate of the batteries out here we however should reevaluate if another generator might be the better option in the end, but this needs to be discussed with our colleagues in Yakutsk and Amsterdam again.
Angela Gallagher (Free University of Amsterdam) using the new satellite communication system (Photo: G. Schaepman-Strub, July 2013).
The same table serves as charging platform for the measuring instruments and computers.
Trash gets burned, the remaining material is currently ‘stored’ in old fuel barrels (Photo: G. Schaepman-Strub, July 2013).
Recycling of acid batteries is an unsolved issue as it is prohibited to take them back by plane.
Anyway, an important task of every stay remains planning ahead for next year. If we need wood for boardwalks this has to be shipped or brought by truck on the frozen river from far away – preferably in winter time. And all of us definitely learned an important lesson – it does not pay off to bring cheap material out here – it usually breaks during the first summer, producing even more trash, and shipping costs might exceed the price of the device. An exception might be rubber-boots – at least the very expensive ones of Bingxi (120 Euros), brought here from the Netherlands, are leaking already in the second summer. But more about rubber-boots and personal equipment philosophies another time!