Fieldwork in Barrow

Barrow is the northern most town in the US. Fifty years ago Barrow was a sleepy town whose inhabitants were largely native Inupiaq people leading a still quite subsistent lifestyle. The area was opened up after the discovery of Arctic oil in the 1960's and the cold war brought a strong Navy presence. The Navy Arctic Research Laboratory (NARL) has now closed, but logistic support for the increasing number of scientists who come to Barrow to study high-lattitude processes, particularly those related to climate change, is now a large industry here.

View South-west from the top of the Bank building in Barrow in late January.

Our work on sea ice is supported by the Barrow Arctic Science consortium (BASC). Pat Cotter and I were up earlier in the season than is usual for our group, and were greated by - 35 C temperatures and about 5 hours of workable daylight.

As part of the developmental phase of the Arctic Ocean Observing System (AOOS) we were installing a collection of instruments called a 'mass balance site'. Instruments included thermistor strings to measure the temperature profile through the sea ice as well as the water below and snow and air above, and 'hydraprobes' for measuring the salinity (salt content) of the ice.

The centre piece is a 5 m (16 ft) mast. The top has a T-section on which are mounted air temperature and humidity sensors and a sonic 'pinger' which by mesuring the distance to the snow below allows us to measure the snow depth. At the bottom of the mast underwater, are two accoustic sounders (range finders), one looking up and one llking down, which allow us to measure the ice thickness as well as the water depth. All of these instruments are connected to a battery-powered data logger, allowing us to make these measurements through the growth and melt season of the ice off Barrow.

Here is our field support / bear guard Scott Oyagak, and Pat Cotter at our site.

As an improvement on previous mass balance sites, this site is equiped with a radio system to transmit the data back to a computer at BASC, which will then be transmitted to our computers back at Fairbanks, and posted on the web in near-real time. You can see the antenna in the picture above.

Jsut before we arrived there was an ivu - an ice shore event in which offshore winds drove the consolidated ice up onto the beach where it crumbled and rode up over itself making mounds up to 50 feet (16 m) high on the road near the bank building. We were lucky to have local scientist and director of BASC Richard Glenn describe many aspects of the ivu. Richard is half Inupiaq and has a unique combination of local and wetern scientific knowledge of the ice conditions and behaviour. I'm certainly not the first kiwi up here. We also met Richard's wife, whose concern in preserving their Inupiaq language led her to New Zealand in the hope of learning about Kohanga Reo and other Maori language initiatives, and Barrow has hosted Maori delegations up here.