I know, it was long time ago I wrote on this blog. My excuse is the PhD. It takes of course a lot of energy and time. Anyway, I'm not going to give a lot of excuses, instead I'll just write a post. :)
Me and my lovely field assistant, and also fiance, Lars went up to Disko island the 10th of june this year to continue the BVOC sampling on the snow-fence experiments that was established 2012 and 2013. Lars learned the instrumentation very quickly and we could work in parallel after only a few measurement rounds.
Actually we did so good that I had to organize that Ludovica brought more tenax tubes to Disko. Tenax tubes are tubes filled with a material that make the BVOC to stick inside the tubes, so that we can bring them home and analyze the content. When we arrived summer had not started for real, it was still snow on the snow fence lee side, which only confirms that the snow-fences works. We measured on the control side and a few days later the snow had melted everywhere.
Lars and I went on a day trip together with two marinbiologist in arctic station boat to study oxygene concentration in a dense kelp forest. We had a great time and Lars and I enjoyed the trip! Dorte and Carlos got some really good data, you can read about it here: link to Arctic science partnership.
After a week or so you get used to the life on Arctic station and I felt very sad when I had to leave Lars and Disko island behind after only two weeks. However, I went home via Illullisat instead of Aasiaat, which was great, I got to see the ice fjord!
I left Greenland after only two weeks for a conference in spain. Gordon Research Conference on biogenic hydrocarbons and the atmosphere. It was a week full of BVOC and aerosols, models and flux measurement data. It was really good to see everyone who's name you've seen in papers and also to learn a lot about BVOC and their fate after they have been emitted from the plants.
I also had a meeting with Dr Jörg-Peter "Jogi" Schnitzler from Munich about a study I'll do in his lab this autumn. We will bring small pieces of tundra to his lab and incubate them in different temperatures. We will continuously measure BVOCs and CO2 to see how the plants react to a future climate scenario. In the end we will also do a isotop labeling to trace the carbon emitted from the plants, do the carbon derive directly from photosynthesis or from storage pools inside the plants? Anyway the meeting was good and I feel more comfortable about that project now.
During the conference we had the opportunity to go sailing on a fishing boat built in the early 1900's. It was a great trip for only a few hours, but we were swimming in the mediterranean and had a great time with two lovely sailors.
Me and Riikka are in two days going to Abisko to collect the plant+soil that will be used in the lab experiment. It will be great to go to Sweden and see the swedish mountains. I hope I'll have some spare time to hike up to the summit of Njulla.
Hope I'll find the time during the summer to post some exciting scientific stories here. See you, I'm off to Abisko!
