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Time Passing
We’ve come as strangers from all points of the compass to live in very close quarters, on a barge in this case. We’ve grown not merely to accommodate each other’s foibles and eccentricities, but to enjoy them as an aspect of our common purpose and shared experience. We’ve become friends. And then, abruptly, we part.
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To the North
The tundra is beautiful in its sheer strangeness, an exotic environment, and vaguely haunting for that. Here summer seems not a season, but an exception.
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What Scientists Do
When you get right down to it, scientists, no matter their particular professional concentration, seek to understand how the natural world works.
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Just a Matter of Time
“Four times more carbon is contained in permafrost,” Max said this morning, “than in the entire biomass in the rest of the world.”
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Duvannyi Yar, Part Two
Dissolved organic carbon samples collected last year by Polaris Project scientists from here at the bottom of the cliff were radiocarbon dated at 30,000 years old. We immediately began finding the bones of big animals that died sometime around then.
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Duvannyi Yar, Part One
“Don’t go wandering off by yourself,” Max warned. “Stay with your group.” There are a lot of ways to get hurt at Duvannyi Yar.
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Bugs, Aii-ee!
Slapping, clapping, waving, scratching—these are common, if not constant signals of life in Siberia.
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The Carbon Bomb
Just a couple of meters beneath this visible surface the ground is frozen solid down some 1,400 meters. This is permafrost.
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We Arrive, Finally
We’ve traveled better than halfway around the globe, through fifteen time zones, twenty hours in the air, nearly as many waiting in airports, and now we’re here, delighted, if disoriented.
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Welcome to the Polaris Project
“I didn’t think anyone went to Siberia willingly,” a friend replied when I told him I was going there with the Polaris Project.
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