Week 2 too now!
18:50:00
At the start of week 2 my class and I left Longyearbyen for
the first time, setting out for our week long field cruse. The work took us
around the west side of the island to the Island ’s
northern most point. Each day we stopped off at different sites to do data
collection for our group projects and in the evenings we had a chance to be on
deck as we travelled seeing the landscape and some amazing wildlife. This
included seeing the trip’s first mother Polar Bear and her cub on a whale carcase.
We also had some free time on the land where we were given the opportunity to
do activities like the polar plunge (swimming) and or having time to do some
fishing (mainly for Arctic Char).
On a few of the days in the middle of the cruse we visited a
bird cliff and visited a local geese researcher who taught us how to trap
geese, weigh and measure them, take a blood samples and ring them so that they
could be tracked on their migration south over winter. On the bird cliffs we
were taken to a long term research camera monitoring the cliff. We were given a
brief lecture before given the task of
counting how many birds were on the cliff at one time. (It definitely takes
practise!)
Our ship “Stalbus” was an amazing and not what came to my
mind when I thought of a research boat. I guess they were easing us into it -
it was virtually a floating hotel. The crew were great. They made a effort to
chat to the students and get to know us, even though English was not their main
language for a lot of them. They also cleaned and cooked for us each night, as
well as looking after the boat.
The week after the trip was filled with Lab work, analysing
the samples that we had collected on the cruise. Each group had collect
hundreds of samples, but we all pitched in to get the work done. Next week
we’ll be using a statistic programming
language (R) to analyse the data and start to write up our reports.
Alistair
Alistair
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