Pictures and descriptions of activities in Sisimiut during our sampling, May 30 through June 9.
Life in Sisimiut, a lovely town of about 6000 people. |
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The coastal portion of the town of Sisimiut.
To the right – art work on the road to the airport reflecting one of the major industries in town, fishing. |
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School children at play and heading out for field trips on a foggy morning. Most the kids are in day care and caught a city bus (Bybus) to their destination.
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| Our housing in Sisimiut. A three bedroom apartment with kitchen and living room. A bit cramped for five people, but we survived.
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 Pictures of the great laboratory space provided by ArTek (see acknowledgements). Above is our staging area with Ellen prepping for a day in the field.
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Below, Andrea is running the Picarro, analyzing gas samples collected the previous day.
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Stream Gauging |
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On the left, an areal view of the bridge over the river on which we have set up one gauging station – see below. This watershed is the water supply for town. |
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| On the right – we’re at the bridge setting up the gauging station. Jon is measuring the location of the angle iron on the face of the rock. The angle iron is bolted to the rock (see below) using anchors inserted into holes drilled in the rock. | ||
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 River flow on May 30 = 4.9 m3/sec |
 River flow on June 1 = 0.46 m3/sec |
| We installed CTDs (conductivity, temperature, and depth) sensor at the bottom angle iron bolted to rocks on the side of the river On the far left, Daniel is standing in the river drilling holes for the installation.In the middle, Philip is measuring the flow rate of the river draining the large watershed east of town. To the right, Jon is measuring flow in a smaller watershed west of town. Integration of multiple flow measurements across the channels, multiplied by the area of the channel allows us to determine discharge (volume of flow) at this particular time. Plotting discharge versus river depth provides a rating curve from which we should be able to determine annual discharge. We plan to record river level over the next year and a half from which we’ll be able to estimate the total volume of water (and solutes) discharging during that time. | ||
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While gauging at the bridge a group of middle schoolers stopped by to ask what was up. They were either on recess or a field trip – it wasn’t clear – but some arrived by bus and some by bike. No teacher in sight. They were extremely interested in what we were doing, and even with a bit of a language barrier, Ellen (on left) and Philip (on right) piqued their interest in discharge from snow melt in deglaciated watersheds – or at least in how a flow meter works. |
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Water and sediment sampling |
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 Above, Philip and Ellen are sampling just downstream of the bridge and installed gauging station. The water composition, coupled with stream discharge measurements will provide estimates of fluxes of solutes to the ocean.
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Below, sampling the large lake upstream from the bridge. The lake was mostly frozen except a small moat around its edge. The ice was full of gas bubbles that gave it the brownish-green tint.
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Below, collecting head space gas samples. The bottles are filled to overflowing and stoppered without any ambient gas. 60 ml of water is removed and replaced with CO2 free gas. The new headspace gas is equilibrated with gas and the water, extracted, and then measured on the Picarro (see above).
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