Heading for the tundra

[luzula]

Tomorrow morning I'm leaving for a hiking trip to the Swedish tundra, so I'll be without internet for a week or so. Sweden actually has lots of tundra, but most of it is alpine tundra in the mountains. But in the far north there's an area of arctic tundra, with permafrost phenomena such as palsas, which are little raised hills with a core of ice that form in boggy ground (not as big as pingos, though). We'll probably have some sort of base camp on higher ground, though, or the mosquitoes will be intolerable.

After that I'm going to my summer job up in the mountains. This year I'll be doing fieldwork on the GLORIA project. There were botanical inventories on several mountain peaks at different altitudes in the 90's, and we'll be doing those same inventories again to investigate how climate change is affecting the vegetation. We'll be down at the main scientific station in Abisko for a week, and I'll have internet then. After that we'll be at a smaller station (the one I was at last year), without phones or internet (well, except for a satellite phone). I'll be back in civilization in mid-August.

I'll be bringing my laptop so I can do some writing (there are solar panels for electricity) and I'm also bringing most of the printed-out Big Bang stories and j_s_cavalcante's Anima, and lots of books.

I might send out postcards, and if you've given me your address at some point, I still have it (sometimes I am organized!). If you haven't, and you want a postcard, just email it to me.

Okay, see you in a week! I'll take some pictures of the tundra for you.

For now, please comment at the LJ entry.

Comments

[luzula]

I will! And I hope you have a good summer, too.

*is in the middle of packing and can't decide whether to take hiking boots, rubber boots or both*