Leaving Barrow

From left: Amy Hansen, Mark Wiener, Susanne Neuer, Craig Aumack, and Andy Juhl

It's official: our first field season has come to an end. The last few days were a mad scramble to pack up everything in the lab, ship items home or put them in storage, and make it to the little Barrow airport in time for the first leg of our red-eye flight home.

The flight over the North Slope was clear, and we could see features below that were obscured by clouds or a thick blanket of snow and ice when we first flew to Barrow. Elongated lakes, most likely the result of scouring by ancient glaciers, and sinuous rivers stretch across the landscape in a lacy framework. Farther south, snow traces the edges of hills or rivers in branching patterns.

Now that we're back in our home labs, we can start analyzing the data we've gathered so far and processing the many samples we collected. Keep an eye on the blog, though, for videos of the scenes we captured below the ice with our underwater camera!