Field photo Friday

One of my field areas is this mid-size river in subarctic Eurasia. It is not only an important waterway, source of freshwater and (sadly) a major outlet for industrial waste, it is also a potential climate archive for the past 100.000 years and an example of what some oil and gas reservoirs look like inside. It is several hundred kilometers long and a thorough study of its deposits and the mechanisms they reflect is probably going to be a lifetime of work. So far we are only scratching the surface. This year we went to five or six sites near the river mouth to investigate what happened to this river as sea levels fell and rose during the last ice age.

I have been a bit obsessed with this story ever since I worked on my dissertation and my advisor talked me into working on some previously published data in a new context. I don't think he really understood this new context himself*, and it took me a lot of overtime and detours to understand where the potential was. At the time I mainly saw the frustrations related to having to write a manuscript for my dissertation based on some data that were not appropriate for the kind of study I was trying to do. But somewhere buried under the frustrations I was also intrigued by the idea of some day going back and collect the right kind of data and do this the way it was supposed to be done in order to work.

This summer I got back to do my own work. It was raining practically every day, we stayed in an awful hotel in town because the ground was too soggy to put up a tent anywhere and we had to go out for dinner in our muddy field clothes each night because we couldn't cook for ourselves in the hotel. But we got some nice results. They didn't change the world from what I knew already, but they did confirm and strengthen some previous ideas based on what other people had done at some of the same sites, and they gave way to more questions and more field work next year. Some of the data will go into the manuscript from my dissertation, which is still sitting, barely touched, on my desk, but which I need to submit to a special publication of a journal in two weeks time. Some will go into another paper I'm going to submit some time next year. But the best part is that I'm pretty sure this will form the start of a lot of future work and presently it's the best foundation I've got for some day applying for a real grown-up grant from the research council.

*My former advisor is an excellent scholar in his field and I'm not trying to imply he doesn't know what he's doing, because generally he does. But, in this particular case I think he had gotten a bit too excited about some new technology that he didn't really know much about, but thought that probably a bright young PhD student could work something out with applying this method to "bunch of old data". Sadly no, either the PhD student wasn't bright enough or the entire idea was rubbish. It cost me about a year in overtime on the PhD, a whole lot of money and gave me only a database of "bunch of old data" which is not very much in demand.

Random bullets of field preparations

• The field season begins tomorrow. The good thing is that regular life obligations will be left behind. The bad thing is that I'm ridiculously tired from dealing with regular life obligations for the next two months. Planning a wedding and two field expeditions at the same time cannot be recommended.
• I am going to live in a tent far out in the forest for the next six weeks and right now the thought of simple life in the nature seems quite appealing. This will probably change as soon as the first mosquitoes make their way into the tent or at least the first time dinner will consist of a random, grey substance coming out of a can.
• I am bringing about 15 unread scientific articles and a manuscript for an article. I wonder when I think I am going to work on all that. 10-12 hour days of hard, physical work doesn't leave an awful lot of time for studying. I seemingly have no memory of previous years or am expecting a lot of rainy stay-at-home-in the-camp days.
• I am also bringing 4 novels, which are totally unrelated to my work. Somehow my imagination of how I will make time for these is much more vivid. One of the good things about living in a tent for weeks on end is plenty of uninterrupted reading time.
• Yesterday I bought the most ridiculous piece of clothing I've ever owned. It's a fishing* vest, that looks a bit more stupid than this, but otherwise the idea is the same. A particularly weird thing about mine is that it had a small patch of white, teddy bearish fabric on one of the pockets. I have pulled it off now, but I suppose it was there for a reason. *I am not going fishing, but need it to carry all the equipment and tools I need for my fieldwork. Yes, sometimes I could just as well have become some sort of handywoman.
• We are bringing 8 big boxes of equipment for a field party of four people (our personal luggage come in addition to this). We would like to believe we're travelling with a lot of important scientific equipment. In reality most of it is camping gear. Some clothes pegs, a blanket or 22 bottles of mosquito repellent, anyone?
• I have also brought a language course on CD and a phrasebook because obviously I think I will have lots of time for spare time activities.
• In reality fieldwork doesn't really deal with spare time or alone time. We live together in the forest in a camp, eat together, work together all day long and return to the camp for dinner and some social life around a campfire. Not too different from living in prehistoric times (although we do have drinks and chocolate and laptops with many, many extra batteries for full function without access to electricity).
• I'm going to return in excellent shape, as field work is just a really strange way of getting some exercise. There is really no better way for me to force myself to get fit, but it's not going to be fun for the first few days.