(Photo: S. Stettner) The Alfred Wegener Institute team 2013 from left - Stefanie, Jaroš , Izabela, Hugues, Juliane, Michael, Ute, George and BorisTuesday, June 25th 2013

 

Hello everyone!!

We'd like to welcome you to the new blog of this year's expedition to Canada called "Herschel Island 2013". If you are new to the work we're doing you can catch up to our last year´s stories here or just hang on :)

 

For our new followers: Herschel Island is an island in the Canadian Beaufort Sea, just off the Yukon Coast. The island is about 10 km wide and only 50 km east of the border to Alaska. It is a fantastic island with amazing vegetation and flowers, fascinating permafrost shorelines, and unique wildlife like whales, seals, birds, and grizzly bears, black bears or polar bears, which we hope not to meet up close. Starting July 3rd, our group will be spending four weeks on Herschel Island.

This year´s Herschel gang is made up of researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) in Potsdam, McGill University, Montreal, and the University of Edinburgh.

 

(Photo: S. Weege) Taking six flights to get from Berlin to Herschel IslandThe AWI team members are our expedition leader Dr. Hugues Lantuit, Dr. Michael Fritz (Post Doc), Ute Bastian (lab coordinator), Boris Radosavljevic (PhD candidate), Stefanie Weege (PhD candidate), Juliane Wolter (PhD candidate), and George Tanski (Master Student). Together we are the COastal Permafrost ERosion group (COPER). Those of you familiar with our group might have noticed that our COPER group is growing and we have two new colleagues we like to introduce you.

Jaroš Obu is our new PhD Student working on establishing a permafrost carbon inventory of the Yukon Coast and will estimate coastal erosion based on LIDAR and remote sensing. Unfortunately he can´t join us this year so we will be doing lots of field work for him, mostly taking shallow sediment cores for carbon quantification. We had our lovely lab coordinator Ute Bastian fill his spot in the field. She already joined the expedition to Herschel Island in 2011, and will support us with her experience and good spirits.

Of course we couldn´t build up such a huge expedition (over 6 weeks and more than 9 scientists) without a lot of fantastic cooperation partners in Canada who already become close friends of ours.

 

(Logo: COPER)Once again we rely on the support of our logistics partner at the Aurora Research Institute in Inuvik, and look forward to meeting our friends and colleagues there. We are also looking forward to meeting the group around Dr. Wayne Pollard from McGill University. And of course the park rangers from Qikiqtaruk-Herschel Island Territorial Park: Richard Gordon, Lee-John Meyook, Ricky, Samuel McLeod, and Edward McLeod.

 

Additional support this year comes from the University of Edinburgh with Dr. Isla Myers-Smith, and Louise Beveridge who will be working on shrub vegetation.

So this year's field group will consist of at least 9 all-time hungry scientists plus a lot of short time visitors from other research institutes in Canada. We are looking forward to an excellent scientific exchange, collecting good data, and cooperation and of fun with our Canadian friends.

If you like, you can follow our Potsdam Research Group COPER via Facebook.