Today I had my first meeting with my advisor, Dr. Glen Macdonald For those of you on the East coast, he will be speaking at Clark University on Thursday, October 8th at 7 as the Atwood speaker. We discussed the research that I will be working on for the next 2-7 years. Basically, I will be exploring the relationship between climate change, water table level, and Carbon storage in arctic peatlands. I'm looking forward to continuing work similar to the research I did last year <www.thepolarisproject.org> (sorry for all of the links).
My MA paper will look at peat samples that are currently in storage at UCLA from Western Siberia. In summer of 2010, another PhD student here, James Holmquist and I will be able to do some field work in the Canadian arctic! If all goes as planned, we will be at the Northern Studies Center in Churchill, Manitoba (see map). There are a lot of exciting aspects of this Churchill place. For example, it lies on the border of arctic tundra and sparse boreal forest, which could lead to some very interesting studies! It is also called the "Polar Bear Capital of the World," ...and you can see the Aurora Borealis there ...and Europeans and natives have used this area as a fur trading post/shipping harbor ever since the whites first arrived in the 1600s, ...AND the station itself used to be used by the Canadian government as a rocket launching experimentation area. Pretty cool eh? (no pun intended I do use the word eh)
Anyway, we will be looking at carbon storage along a northern transect (and perhaps another transect further south). This will be the foundation of a doctorate paper...by the future Dr. Willis? Speaking of which, here's another fun link.
That's it for today.
-Kate
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