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| The kayakers made colourful splashes in the background |
This morning we anchored in Maxwell Bay and went ashore (Lindsay still nursing injuries stayed on board ship). Some people went off hiking, me? I did one of my favourite things - beach combing. Would have been wonderful if I’d been alone. Not possible of course with bears on the prowl, but fortunately there was only a small group of us. . I found flowers, moss and wee Arctic trees, tufts of qiviut snagged by vegetation (the soft undercoat of the musk ox) and the kind of stuff you often find on the beach. Scattered around in patches were small clam shells indicating that walrus had probably been there.
The beach was sloping loose small shale stones and was very slippery so very hard to walk on particularly tackling many Km in great clumping gumboots. And to top it off the tundra was sucking mud in many places, so our legs certainly got a work out, but it was an absolutely marvellous few hours.
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A young fulmar taken out by a peregrine falcon probably -
there were feathers everywhere |
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| A small forest of Arctic willow. The fluffy things are the seed heads |
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| A little piece of Arctic willow bleached white by sea and sun |
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| The dainty tufted saxifrage |
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| Top: tiny Tufted Arctic Saxifrage. Centre: bog sedge. Bottom: Arctic willow |
The environment looks harsh but everywhere life burst out between the rocks and over the ground forming a cushiony mat.
We also found bear footprints as well as musk ox hoof prints in the mud. A bear print had been spotted early by the scouts so we went prepared with equipment to make casts.
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Making plaster casts which were then marked with small Inukshuk (piles of stones).
The moulds came out pretty good. |
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| Polar bear footprint and cast |
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| Musk ox hoof print and cast |
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| Human (moi!) gumboot imprint! |
I got comprehensively stuck almost up to my knees in the mud on the tundra and had to be hauled out. The end of my walking pole is still down in there!
One of our citizen science projects is making cloud observations to coordinate with NASA’s satellite images (part of their GLOBE project) - its time and location dependent. GLOBE stands for the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment Program. It’s an international science and education program that anyone worldwide can participate in. We were alerted to when a satellite would be passing over and we would then go out on deck (or in a zodiac!) and make cloud observation and take photos at different sky levels. We then uploaded our on-the-ground measurements to the website for the scientists to compare with what the satellites see. Yesterday NASA reported that we got a match with one of our observations! We were quite excited.
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