After spending time in Willow talking about ALISON with Pam Horton’s assembled volunteers (parents and students), instead of setting up the study site on Willow Lake because of poor weather, we headed south again, destination Anchorage. After a brief stop in Wasilla for another coffee at the Mocha Moose, we reached the hotel at about 2 pm.

I spent much of Saturday afternoon dealing with e-mail that had accumulated since Wednesday. The Anchorage hotel has easy Ethernet access to the Internet, unlike the Wasilla High School and hotel wireless networks that wouldn’t allow me to connect and check e-mail to see if anyone was demanding my attention on Thursday and Friday. After a productive afternoon, we enjoyed a wonderful dinner at the Bombay DeLuxe Restaurant on Northern Lights Boulevard.

On Sunday morning we met Craig Kasemodel (Central Middle School for Science) and his fiancée, Diane, for breakfast at Snow City Café (another good place to eat). Later in the morning, Kim, Craig and I visited Eastchester Lagoon, Craig’s intended location for his ALISON study site. It is an ideal site for ALISON and for Craig (close to school), but conditions were not ideal for installing the ice gauge and wooden stakes.

The warm weather had created extensive overflow around the margins, and there was a large area of open water where Chester Creek flows into the lagoon. Commonsense prevailed and, rather than venture out onto dangerous ice, we agreed to try again in January when Martin returns to Anchorage for the American Association of Physics Teachers conference. Let’s hope that more wintry conditions return soon to Anchorage.

Our visitor passes show that we were at Central Middle School for Science early on Monday morning, 12 December 2005.

That didn’t end our visit to Anchorage. Soon after 8 am on a snowy Monday morning, 12 December, we were at Central Middle School to talk to the roughly 100 students who are taught by the team of teachers to which Craig belongs. The students were very attentive and asked interesting questions, and didn’t hesitate to answer my questions.

We also enjoyed seeing Patty Gallego, who took her students to make measurements at Horseshoe Lake, Denali Park, for two consecutive winters before leaving Tri-Valley School, Healy, and moving to Anchorage. We didn’t know that she was teaching mathematics at Central Middle School, so it was a very pleasant surprise to see her.

And then it was back out into the snow, of which 5-10 cm are forecast to accumulate today, with a further 2-5 cm overnight. The return of snow and lower temperatures will make it more interesting and increase the likelihood that we will be able to set up the study sites in Eagle River (tomorrow, Tuesday 13 December) and Willow on Wednesday
14 December.

23-24 January 2006

The last time I (Martin) was in Anchorage, with Kim Morris, was during 10-12 December 2005, when we were unable to put in the study site on Eastchester Lagoon due to warm weather and poor ice conditions – because of recent rain, Chester Creek was in full flow and had melted a large area of ice where it enters the lagoon. This time, the weather and ice conditions were quite different – Anchorage was cold (it was -15 to -20°C on the lagoon on Monday afternoon, and about -25°C in town on Monday night) and the lagoon had a complete and safe ice cover.

This corner of Eastchester Lagoon was open water on Sunday
11 December when we originally hoped to set up the study site. Taken on Monday 23 January, this photograph also shows the Chugach Mountains in the distance north of Anchorage.

The original plan for Monday morning, 23 January, was to visit Psalm Lake to make measurements with Kim Bautista (link to Eagle River people and location). Unable to do that because the road to Psalm Lake/Birchwood Camp had not been ploughed after a weekend of heavy snow, we met at Ravenwood School and talked about using the ice thickness gauge and other ALISON things.

At 2 pm I was at Central Middle School to meet Craig Kasemodel and go out to Eastchester Lagoon. The weather was perfect – cool (as described above), calm and hardly a cloud overhead. These ideal conditions enabled us to put in the study site and make a complete set of measurements in about two hours. We would have taken a little less time but for fact that we learned that the lagoon is shallow (at least it is where we chose to put the study site) after drilling a couple of holes at prospective sites for the ice thickness gauge. The strong smell of hydrogen sulphide that followed drilling through the ice also told us that there is not much oxygen in the water.

By 4:30 pm, soon after sunset, I was on my way back to the hotel to shower and put on some respectable clothes for my evening performance at the Winter Meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers. I gave an invited talk on The Arctic’s Changing Cryosphere and the International Polar Year. I was followed by John Walsh (UAF/International Arctic Research Center) on Sea Ice and Snow: Agents of Climate Change, and Glenn Juday (UAF/School of Natural Resources and Agricultural Sciences) on Ecological Manifestations of Climate Change in Alaska. John and Glenn both gave good talks, but it was particularly Interesting to hear Glenn’s biological perspectives.

Craig and I were back at Eastchester Lagoon on Tuesday afternoon, this time with seven of his students, his teaching team’s language arts teacher (Shannon) and five curious visitors from the Physics Teachers conference. Craig, Shannon and the students encountered a moose on the trail between school and the lagoon, so their arrival was delayed a little as they had to make a detour around the moose. By 3:30 pm were on the ice and I was demonstrating the equipment and how to make measurements. As we talked the sun set and the air temperature (-22°C at one point) decreased, but the students persevered and impressed the visitors and me with their knowledge and understanding. I think the Anchorage study site is in good hands.

Looking west across Eastchester Lagoon towards Minnesota Drive, Tuesday
24 January 2006.

Despite being cold after patiently listening to me talk and demonstrate the equipment, Craig (right) and his students posed for a photograph on Eastchester lagoon before hurrying back to school. Also in the photograph are Shannon ?? (language arts teacher at Central Middle School for Science; back row, far left) and Barb and Bob (back row, middle and right), who were attending the Physics Teachers conference that was being held in Anchorage during 21-25 January 2006.