Survivor Ellesmere

Only CANDAC operators can drive the trucks up here, and one of those two people has Sundays off. So we had to have a smaller group of people at the lab yesterday. Since my instrument is automatic, I spent the day at the station, sleeping in and catching up on some work that needs to get done soon. Since it was Sunday, the Sun decided to make its second appearance of the campaign and its first appearance at the station since October. (We see it a day or so earlier at the lab since we're 600 m above sea level.) And so here's the first sunrise at Eureka in 2007. You probably won't be able to make it out, but this is taken from the beach of Slidre Fjord. (After years of showing pictures of the Arctic I know that it takes a special eye to be able to determine where the frozen water stops and where the ground starts.) (Melissa had been invaluable in sitting through hundreds of pictures of white while I learned this fact.)

While we were out sunabathing, we were visited by a very fast moving bunny, who we watched run at us from the station and then past us out on the fjord. Whenever I see Arctic hare run, I think they look funny, since they're not hopping like other bunnies. They look like horses when they run. Except when you look at their tracks, they are perfectly bunny-like. So maybe I'm just not capable of identifying hopping. We we also hunted by a fox, who circled us a couple of times, and then cautiously headed downwind, where he seemed to be deciding if he should attack us, or if we were going to attack him. The foxes are such adorable balls of foxy fluff. And the one that lives at the station is so fat and roly-poly it's even more adorable. I'll try to get better pictures.

Today we awoke to stronger winds, gusting pretty heavily, but made our way to the lab anyways. Halfway through the morning it was decided that we would head home for lunch, since the snow was blowing pretty heavily and that can blow in the road. The problem when it blows isn't so much visibility (though that can certainly be reduced to zero) but the small little snow flakes that get blown around and packed really hard. When this happens on the road, you end up with what is sometimes an impassible drift. Then you have to wait for the front end loader to come out and plow the road. And that (a) can take a long time, and (b) costs a lot of money. Of course, once we made the decision to come down, the weather got a bit better, and all the people that need direct Sun to do measurements spent the afternoon looking longingly at the slivers of the Sun that we could make out on the webcam images from up at the lab. Hopefully we'll start to get better weather soon, and I can go out and take pictures of vaguely different colours of white for you all to enjoy.