Churchill - Day Four

We pretty much have the same schedule everyday for the time being. In the morning we get briefed about work, weather conditions, get repaired or missing equipment and head out before 9 am. Today's weather  felt more like the arctic conditions we were expecting - overcast, windy and nippy.  Afterwe finished our tree coring duties, we went on to do our first sapling/seeding quadrant.. Some are only sveral centimeters high, so dfficult to find at first glance. When you look for a while, you begin to notice how many different types of vegetation there is packed into asmall area. Did get to see another ptargiman and canadian goose nest.

After lunch we took our tree core samples out of the drying ovens and learned how to glue them in trays so researchers can sand them down in order to see the rings more clearly. Trees here grow very slowly and there are a lot of rings to count even in very small trunks. We then headed out again, this time to a new tree island (about 50+ trees) and started our task of finding black or white spruce or larch seedlings or saplings (1 cm to 1.9m high.) Talk about finding a needle in a haystack! It’s a good thing one of our team has a good sense for it. It stayed on the chilly side so it felt good to come back and have a cup of warm tea. Took care of samples, had dinner and reconvened in our classroom for a lecture on local terrain features that are common to a permafrost environment.

We are hoping to spot some northern lights due to a recent solar flare-up but its not likely due to several conditions – doesn’t get too dark, waning full moon and its been cloudy anyway.