After a four year hiatus, I finally returned to Barrow. I arrived on the morning flight and checked into the rather elegant King Eider Inn, a stone's throw from the airport. The weather was (relatively) warm, mid-teens, with only a slight breeze. Nice day to set up a site.

After lunch, I walked over to Barrow High School to meet Tim Buckley, our resident teacher. While waiting for his chemistry class to finish, Henry Gueco (from BASC) and I went to hunt down the thermistor string and pelican case, which, of course, ended up being at NARL already. Time well spent. At 2:30pm, Tim and I drove to NARL to pick up equipment and then headed out to Imikpuk Lake.

When we reached the site, Tim realized he had forgotten the stakes. While he headed back to town, I started to drill holes while watching out for polar bears. The lake was entirely congelation (black) ice with a millimeter coating of snow. Very slippery. Needless to say, before I even started drilling, I landed square on my behind. By the time Tim returned, I had completed the 21 holes for the stakes in the line which was way better than the one Martin and Tim did together last year. Tim and I then packed the stakes into the hole and installed the thermistor string and TWIT using the fabulous super saw. From those two holes we measured ~29 cm of ice. Tim and I then drove out to the point (well, to the end of the road) to see if we could locate some tide gauges from another project he helps on. Though they were well under the ice cover, we seemed to have the right spot (thank you GPS), and Tim will be going out with another class to retrieve them on some future day.

We then returned to town and I went back to the hotel where I spent a nice evening talking with the managers (a couple who just moved up from Florida) and watching cable TV.

Friday morning I was back at the school to talk to Tim's General Science Class, the class which will be doing the observations. I must admit I was nervous, this being the first time talking to a class about the project. My committee is one thing, twelve freshman is much worse. Tim briefly explained the project to them and what they will be doing. Then, Tim and I led a discussion on climate change and the role of snow and ice in it. For material that the students did not have much background in, they had some great observations and made some great connections. After school, Tim and I went over how to download the data from the thermistors and then went out to the lake to hook up the datalogger to the thermistor string. We had left the school in the middle of a snow storm. However, by the time we reached the lake, it abated, but had left over an inch of the fluffy stuff on the lake. Unfortunately, the data we got was not good. I was not able to fix the problem before leaving Barrow Friday evening, but Tim and I are working on it, and hopefully we'll have some spectacular data soon.