Sediment research in 2017

Guest post by Casey Beel, Ph.D. candidate

This season was interesting for High Arctic hydrology. Total snowfall, and snow water equivalence estimates, was amongst the highest at Cape Bounty since monitoring began in 2003. This year also saw a significant delay in the initiation of snowmelt and channel flow, with the start of discharge not beginning until June 22 - the second latest day of first flow in our records. This change to the hydrology creates more questions about how this year will fit into our longer term record and what increased snowfall means for suspended sediment transfer.

Camping out at the West River station during a long sampling campaign.

The main objective of my research this year was to gain a better understanding of the temporal patterns of suspended sediment transfer. To do this, I spent 15 hours camped out in my waders, with a deck chair for comfort, and over 200 sample bottles, collecting water every 10 minutes from the West River. Thankfully, I choose a perfect day for this saga - with blue skies and warm temperatures. Across the river, two Greater Snow Geese have chosen a small grassy knoll to nest, and for the majority of my day, they were my only company, and as the hours drew on, I began to realize that they weren’t great conversationalists.

West River at full runoff.

One of the exciting additions to my research is that it is spatially distributed across multiple catchments. This allows me the opportunity to explore the landscape and find exciting new landscape features, fossils, and even marine shells that are emerging from degrading slopes. So far this year, we have discovered a newly forming landscape disturbance in the lower East River catchment, revisited the expanding retrogressive thaw slump to the north of camp, and collected enough rocks for my collection to warrant an extra bag of luggage for the trip home.

Life at Cape Bounty

Guest post by M.Sc. student Amanda Schevers

The best way to carry the stand for the precipitation collectors. This is at the top of the West River catchment, I’m just about to install the final collector. 

I never thought I would ever consider battling snowstorms, bone-chilling winds, and sub-zero temperatures for an entire summer to be so rewarding and fun, yet somehow I ended up at Cape Bounty. Despite hearing stories from past students, seeing pictures, and reading more papers than I can remember, I still managed to be completely shocked when I hopped off the plane onto the lake ice. No pictures will ever do this place justice.

            But why am I here, in an uninhabited island in the middle of the High Arctic? Sometimes, when I get caught up in the small details of things, stepping back and re-reading my research proposal helps remind me what I am actually trying to accomplish while I am here (which, by the way is for a total of 64 days). We’ve heard all about climate change and how much it will change the world we live in, but how exactly is it going to change the surface water we, and countless aquatic ecosystems rely on?

To help answer this question, I’m going to be monitoring two rivers and their respective watersheds. This may sound easy, but it means I’m going to end up hiking 15-20 km carrying 10-12 litres of water every single day. Luckily I have PhD candidate Casey to help me out. We installed a network of monitoring stations, wells to collect subsurface water, and four precipitation collectors across the landscape. My first week at camp was spent out on the tundra, getting to know the land, the equipment, and getting a taste of the wide range of research that occurs at Cape Bounty.

            One of the best parts of hiking such a large area every day is the chance to see so many incredible things. Hiking up through snow lined channels, stopping to admire the approaching wolves, caribou, and muskox, and checking out all the bones scattered across the tundra are some of my favourites.

Before installing stations, we decided to walk up the East river channel. Water creates some pretty cool features. 

            Life at camp hasn’t been too shabby either. We’ve managed to bake a giant cookie, brownie, and apple crisp all in a frying pan. After a long, cold day in the field and in the lab a relaxing evening with dessert and camp stories are the perfect way to end the day. 

Tundra Times

Posted by CBAWO M.Sc. student Matt Gillman

Teamwork is a large part of the scientific investigations that take place at the Cape Bounty Arctic Watershed Observatory (CBAWO) here on Melville Island, Nunavut. As a result, a given day may entail assisting in running an ice auger through 2 metres of lake ice so that a sediment core may be retrieved for a limnological view into paleoclimatology; or possibly hiking over tundra to collect soil and/or surface water for hydrological- or biogeochemical-based projects; or maybe collecting atmospheric gas samples with the purpose of investigating greenhouse gas emissions and drawdown due to vegetation; or grabbing stream water samples for sedimentological work; the list goes on.

My work here is focused on improving our understanding of how subsurface hydrology and hydraulics determine the delivery of water and nutrients to High Arctic Rivers. I am particularly interested in late season delivery of subsurface water and nitrogen, both of which act as controls on water quality. From this work I hope to provide information which may be applied to resource management decisions concerned with High Arctic water security, as well as future scientific endeavors aimed at building on our understanding of northern hydrology.

Now that the river is thawed and subsurface flow of water is becoming more abundant, my work in the river system consumes most of my days. Such days involve collecting solute and temperature data along the length of the river to look at the location of subsurface inflows, collecting water samples to assess the chemical composition of waters in soils adjacent to the channel, and measuring water table levels in sampling wells to map out the hydraulic conditions near the river.

Research aside, the landscape and wildlife at CBAWO are amazing. A photo can rarely give justice to the rolling hills and bedrock outcrops of the tundra. Regardless of how rough one’s day is going, it can normally be set right by a brief look around as reminder of setting. Elusive as they may be at times, the wolves, caribou, muskoxen, and arctic foxes are always a neat surprise to come across. 

A muskox enjoying some beautiful weather on the western bank of the Boundary River, Melville Island, NU.

Having had rare encounters, the animals on Melville Island have little fear of humans and are quite curious. The muskox seen in the photo here was content to watch us work from the opposite bank of Boundary River, a river which drains a lake on the boundary of Nunavut and The Northwest Territories.

As a whole, I am thoroughly enjoying the beginning of my first full (I spent a couple of weeks here last summer) field season conducting Arctic-based research. I am lost for words to describe how neat it is to be here.

Day in the Life of an Arctic Scientist

(Contributed by CBAWO student Maddie Harasyn- Queen's University)

Science in the Arctic has turned out to be really fun! I have been here for just over two weeks and I’m actually starting to get used to the Cape Bounty routine. It usually begins with waking up at 7:30 AM to the bright light shining through the fluorescent walls of the tents we all sleep in. Then the whole crew migrates down to the Weatherhaven (what we call our mess tent) for coffee and a breakfast of either oatmeal or pancakes. We typically add excessive amounts of toppings to our breakfast to change it up a little – peanut butter, Nutella, raisins or on special mornings M&M’s. Over breakfast, we talk about all of our schedules for the day.

My schedule involves walking down to the river beside our campsite at 9 AM and collecting water samples. I then filter the water samples to measure the amount of suspended sediment, dissolved oxygen and ions in the water which involves three separate filtering processes. Often other researchers in camp offer to help me filter, as we all help out each other when we can! I then hike out to the three smaller sub-catchments that feed the river which I just sampled and collect the same water samples at each, which is about an hour and a half hike. We always go out in pairs for safety, so the hike is filled with good conversation and lots of laughs. We often find cool things on our hikes as well, like interesting rocks or full skeletons of Muskox.

Then back to filtering in our lab tent, which occupies time until lunch rolls around. For lunch, we often make soup, Kraft Dinner or eat copious amounts of peanut butter and jam on Ryvita crackers. My afternoon often consists of helping others with their research projects – like installing sensors, or hiking up to one of the sub-catchments to collect data from the loggers recording data across the landscape. It is very interesting to learn what other students are studying up here, and how their projects are coming along. Everyone has very interesting and very diverse topics, which makes every day different and exciting. To end off the day, I complete my final rounds of water sample collections at all of the sites, and filter everything before dinner. Some dinner favorites are spaghetti, burritos or chili. Over dinner, we chat about what we accomplished during the day and neat things that we all found out on the tundra. Then we head back off to bed, in the same brightness which we woke up to.

Hiking to East Lake to collect water samples.

My personal project is looking at the water chemistry in the East and West Lake to the south of our campsite. A previous researcher discovered that small depressions exist in the bottom of the lakes, which could hint that groundwater is seeping into the lakes via these sites. My project is focused on determining the source of these depressions, which I will do by studying the water chemistry in each depression. This is done by drilling holes in the lake ice, and lowering a device down the water column slowly that measures depth, electrical conductivity, temperature, dissolved oxygen and turbidity. Water chemistry samples are also collected at the bottom of each site, to be analyzed for ions and isotopes back in the lab. After lowering this device at all 22 sites, the data can be viewed on one of the lab computers and studied to help hypothesize what may be occurring at the bottom of the lake at these sites.

So far, I have found that the East Lake has mostly uniform conductivity throughout the water columns at all of the sites, whereas some specific sites in the West Lake show an increase in conductivity and decrease in dissolved oxygen with depth in the lower water column. This could suggest that groundwater is entering the lakes through these depressions, as groundwater would have a higher concentration of dissolved ions which increase the conductivity of the water at these sites. The water chemistry analyses and historic records of the disturbance patterns in this area will help consolidate this hypothesis, which will be completed as part of my thesis back at Queen’s throughout the final year of my undergraduate program.

Both lakes we are studying can be seen above: East to the left and West to the right.

Snow melt- and rain?

The 2016 snow melt season is nearly over now.  It goes by very quickly and is usually done in a few weeks in June.  Conditions this year were initially a bit strange.  There was really not very much snow and things started to brown very fast once the melt began in early June.   The West River was flowing by June 6, which is almost the earliest we have seen since 2003 (2005 was the earliest, by a day.  Similar limited snow cover).  What was unusual was that we had several days of heavy rain in early June just as the melt was starting.  Aside from the shear discomfort of driving rain and wind on snow machines, this is an unprecedented event in our time at Cape Bounty, and rain is very important as it usually really speeds up snow melt because the rain has a lot of heat in it.  We'll have to wait for the numbers to say what the real effect was, but a strange start to the season.

Here are some photographs to compare how much the timing of snow melt has changed over the years.

In 2003, when we started, snow melt peaked around July 3.   This is what the East River looked like on June 27 as flow was just starting:

In 2005, snow melt peaked around June 8.  Here is the East River (looking towards the lake) on June 10.

The difference in spring snow melt has been nearly a month over the period we have worked at Cape Bounty.  That may not sound like much, but consider that the melt season usually only lasts until late August.  In warm years (like 2005, and so far 2016), the melt season is nearly 50% longer.  

So is 2016 really going to be a record warm year in the Arctic?  Some recent research suggests that we should not necessarily expect this, but it is not a simple answer as you will see.

2016 Reseach season: snow, soil and ice

This blog has been quiet for two years- hard to believe how fast the time went by.   We'll try to post more frequently, especially now that the field season is underway.

We opened the camp on May 18 and found the tents and equipment in generally good shape.   Conditions were already looking unusually warm based on weather from other stations in the area, and a pilot mentioned that he saw little snow on Melville Island while flying over in March.  

When we arrived, there seemed to be a lot of snow, especially around camp where we had to dig it out.  However, when we did our snow survey, we found it was quite the opposite.  Snow is a funny thing, you just can't measure it in one spot.  It blows around all winter and the depth tends to be quite different from place to place.  Each year we carry out a snow survey that involves 28 locations in the river basins and at each location, we measure depth in ten spots along a line.  We also collect snow samples with a metal tube and weigh the snow to determine how much water there actually is in the snow.  This gives us a way to calculate what hydrologists call the "snow water equivalence", or SWE (s-whee).  One way to think of SWE is how much water would be left on the land if you melted all of the snow.  It is measured as a depth, so you can think of the depth of water for a given SWE.  

The snow at CBAWO this year was very limited, the least we have measured since 2005.  It was 49 mm, about 60% of a typical year.  In many places, the snow was just a thin covering over the soil.  That indicates that there is very little water on the land for runoff this spring, something that is very important for many of the systems we monitor.

One of the things that we were interested in sampling this year was the frozen soil to see how much water was in it and how ice was formed the previous winter.  This affects how the soil thaws and how the water will flow in the soil.  Many researchers recover samples of the deeper permafrost, but this soil is not really permafrost, as it almost always thaws.  We refer to this as the "active layer", or the part of the soil that thaws during the summer.  As the name implies, this is the part of the soil where a lot of important things happen:  plants root, water moves and changes properties, and an important ecosystem of microbial life recycles dead plant matter and supports vegetation growth.  

To sample the frozen soil, we use a power auger and a hollow bit that cuts down and brings up frozen soil material.  The auger is big, powerful, and has a mind of it's own:  when it hits a rock, it can stop dead and throw the people operating it.  We give it a lot a respect and have affectionately named it 'Taz', after the Tasmanian Devil in the cartoons!

The frozen soil is pretty neat to look at.  This photo shows a section from 60-75 cm depth, and you can see some clear ice lenses and structure starting to appear.   Ice formed in these lenses late in the autumn and will only thaw late this coming summer.  When it does, the water released will be able to drain out, but we find the quality of this water is very different from snow runoff.  As you go deeper, there is even more ice, sometimes just ice for intervals of 10 cm or more.  

These samples will be analysed for their water content and we plan to get images of the ice structure while they are frozen using a special scanner like the ones they use in hospitals to image bones.  We hope by understanding how water is stored and moves through the soil at different times of year, we can better predict how climate changes will affect water in the High Arctic, and how this will contribute to the stability of the landscape and ecosystem.

And now to tease with an image that looks like something out of a movie.  No, it is not some futuristic weapon.  We actually put that underwater in the lakes to learn more about what is going on at the bottom.  That is a story for another time.  Thanks for following.

Research infrastructure

Autumn is a time when we are hard at work analysing the data from the past field season.  We also have to start to plan for the next season with many applications for funding due in November and permits to renew. Plans for 2014 are coming along nicely and we expect to be at CBAWO for almost three months.

A big part of operating a long term research program is to carry out basic, systematic measurements that are needed for all kinds of work.  These include weather, river, soil and lake measurements and they are the cornerstone of our efforts at CBAWO.  In this region of the Arctic, there are no systematic river or lake measurements taken by government agencies, and the nearest weather station is 300 km away at Mould Bay, so we really need to have good quality data for our research.  

This map shows the current primary measurement network.  There are a number of weather, river and lake stations that have been in operation from the beginning in 2003, and some like the small streams and soil stations that have been added since that time.  There are many other locations not shown here that are sampled regularly but this network is the core of CBAWO.

In the last two years, we have added time lapse cameras to this basic network.  We have two located on a plateau edge to provide images of the ice cover on each lake.  This is very important for us as we are not usually there when the ice forms in autumn, and in some years (like 2013), the ice comes off the lakes after we leave as well.  The cameras perform well but can be buried by snow, so we miss much of the winter.

We installed a time lapse camera on the West River station in 2013 as well, looking down stream at the river and lake.  The goal of this is to provide some visual indication of what happens at the river in our absence.