Churchill Day 6: peat smells like poop

This morning LeeAnne (who runs the station), Carly (who works here also and is very badass), James and I took our first successful long cores of our first hummock/hollow site. I got to help drill down into the earth with the auger! Very exciting. As the cores were pulled out of the ground, I got my first whiff which was surprisingly awful. Apparently dense, decomposed peat smells exactly like poop and therefore is extremely fun to dig into, especially on a hot, still day where there are lots of flies around.

We cored 3 long cores about 150 centimeters into the ground, which was mostly icy permafrost. I think that the most exciting moment was when I dropped the measuring tape and it bounced nicely into the 1.5 meter borehole. It was a good Kate moment. (and yes, I did retrieve the core, along with the tape sitting on top of it.) The very bottom of the cores were composed of gravel and sand, indicating that before the peatland developed here, the land surface was actually marine. We are guessing that the marine layer is about 2,000 years old and since then peat has been accumulating.

Later in the day, I took my first GPR transect. I used the same line that we collected cores along at site 1, so that we can compare the cored points to the GPR transect line. I used a 500MHz antennae, which gave us a 3D slice 12 meters into the ground. However, halfway through collecting the GPR data, giant storm clouds began to roll in slowly. The the wind picked up, fog rolled in, and large bolts of lightning came closer into view, and we decided to pack up and abandon ship. 5 minutes after we made it back to the station, the buildings were impailed with bullet to golf ball sized hail. The storms move quickly here! [Perhaps because of the large pressure differences over the hot land and the cold Hudson Bay??]

All in all, yet another successful day even though it was cut short. I am hoping to get some perpendicular GPR transects to pinpoint the long cores we took, and to get a few more long cores and surface samples tomorrow before we leave. Until then, I have a Churchill yoga class to attend ;)