The last solar frontier

In my 3 months up here so far, I’ve experienced several types of sky conditions: 24 hours of pitch-black, midnight darkness (Jan 6 to mid-Feb), a gradual daily transition of increasing twilight (mid-Feb to Mar 1), the first sunrise in 150-odd days (Mar 1) and increasing daylight hours (Mar 1 to present). Now, tonight is going to be the last special event that I need to witness. April 5^th is the last night that the sun will go below the horizon. At approximately 11:15pm tonight, the sun will rise for the last time until mid-September…24 hour daylight. I took the picture below last night on my way home from the bar at 12:30 (i.e. after sunrise). It is WAY too easy to lose track of how late it is when at midnight it looks like a nice 7pm sunset down south.

I thought that I’d throw in some more pictures of the lab for you to see. One thing about the snow up here, although there isn’t much of it, it moves around. Total, we’ve only gotten 60cm of snow all winter (60cm = ~60mm of water = well below the standard definition of a desert), and the average snow cover up here is in the mid-30cm’s. Due to the low, low temperature though, there is no liquid water in the snow pack to hold anything together. With the high winds, the snow is pushed around (in a process called saltation, for you physical Geography folks out there) and gets packed tightly enough that it almost feels like concrete. It also forms drifts around basically everything. The pictures below don’t do it justice, but one is taken from the roof of the lab, and the other is taken from true ground level looking up. The drift is about 25 feet high!

I’m also taking some time out of my day now to run some high-tech scientific experiments…..ok, maybe not. I’m running the time honoured “Does it break when you freeze water in it?” experiment. I’ve got a pretty big freezer to work with, and at -35 things freeze pretty quickly. My most fun one yet was a 20ml scintillation vial that exploded in 8 minutes :)

I also just got word today that my flight back will likely route through Iqaluit instead of Thule. Most people complain about that, as everything is really expensive, but I say, “Who cares?”, because I get reimbursed for it anyways! It’s just another cool locale to explore and get some pictures of. As long as I get back in time for school, I’m happy.

Graham