Blast-off!

Well it is hard to believe I am completing our third post in 48 hours, but hey why not! Some cold, cold rain continued yesterday and into today but that didn't stop us from doing a few different things. Yesterday evening the CNSC hosted a "Research in Action" tour which was basically an information session for members of the community and visitors to the town of Churchill to learn more about different research initiatives taking place at the CNSC this year. Our beautiful bluff was one of the sites this year, so despite the cold rain and wind we had a full busload of people come out to our site and listen to us explain a bit about what we do out there everyday. It was fun and good practice to give a general explanation of the project, answer questions and show off some zooplankton. Other projects that community members got to hear about included travels of the Hudsonian Godwit, local adaptation of Yellow Warblers and carbon dynamics of peatlands. Overall people seemed interested and excited about all of the projects presented by researchers.

On the way back to the centre, we stopped outside some of the old rocket range facilities to learn a little more about the history of the site prior to the CNSC. I had walked or driven past the buildings before but never really knew much about them! The Churchill Research Rocket Range was officially closed in 1982 and at that point the CNSC purchased the operations building which is where the centre is now (although soon the CNSC will have a brand new building as well and its current building will be renovated!). The rest of the buildings except for a few storage sheds still belong to the province of Manitoba. In 1954 the rocket range opened as a consortium between many different groups interested in research of the upper atmosphere as part of the Internatonal Geophysical Year. Research was conducted on topics such as the aurora borealis and several different types of rockets were launched from different buildings, generally named for the type of rocket launched from them. Interested agencies would have included NASA and the Canadian Space Agency as well as universities such as the University of Saskatchewan.
This is a picture of the parking lot of the CNSC when we first arrived, in the right background of the picture you can see some of the old launching buildings.

In our continued quest to learn more about local culture, the Planktoneers and a few friends went to a tufting workshop at the Artic Trading Company- http://www.arctictradingco.com/. Tufting involves using caribou hair (died in an assortment of colours) to create images by stitching the hair to leather and trimming it into short "tufts." A patient women guided us through this exercise and I definitely have a better appreciation for the time and effort that it takes to produce even a small piece...and hence why the price tags that accompany these pieces can often be quite high. Erinn's tufting effort was the closest to the original pattern and she created a lovely flower broach:

Notice the neat two-toneness of the petals!

Ingrid strayed away slightly from the flower idea and instead created an anatomically correct model of a calanoid copepod! All I can say is wow!

And me, well while fine motor skills have never been my absolute strong suit I decided I was still going to try and make a flower. Soon however I noticed that my tufts were in a line rather than circular and my flower attempt turned into...a worm or caterpillar, now named Henry.

After our busy day yesterday we are spending today counting samples and doing some other work- it is supposed to be nice weather for the next few days which should help us with our sampling, we have a bit to catch up on because of weather and bears. Also coming up is the Bay Dip on Saturday. I ended up practicing a bit for it during a bike ride to Ramsay Lake last week (the ice on that lake is now completely gone).

On an unrelated side note- if anyone out there knows how to install R packages while using Vista, advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!