Life's Been Busy

As if life hasn't been busy enough, in the month after my last entry, two friends had babies, multiple ski races occurred, the ski season ended, final reports were due at work, a visit from an out-of-town friend was super welcome, and my NCAA basketball bracket took me on an emotional roller coaster, but that was March...

After all of that, I had to leave town rather unexpectedly to monitor ocean surface currents in Cook Inlet. I know that may not seem busy nor exciting, but it is for me. A volcano in Alaska, Mt. Redoubt, has been causing some trouble.


For a while Redoubt was cancelling a lot of flights and showering ash on people in south central Alaska. More recently things have quieted down a bit, but originally there was a chance of oil spilling into Cook Inlet from storage tanks at the base of the volcano, so people like me wanted to make sure we knew where any spill would directed and when, in order to help expedite a cleanup during such a disaster. To accomplish this goal, we set up three different field sites around Cook Inlet, Alaska, one in Kenai, one on an offshore platform named Osprey, and one in Kasilof.

The first setup was on the beach north of Kenai, a town which is known for great fishing.


It was chilly, but the snow was melting, so things were definitely moving in the right direction. I got to enjoy the weather while walking around the beach with a GPS, VHF radio, and an antenna in a backpack. This is the way we calibrate our field instruments.


The beach access was a little sketchy, but luckily I made it both down and up.


The next day we were flown in a helicopter out to an oil platform to set up another field site.


It was my first helicopter ride, and the take off and landing were pretty cool, but other than that, it was (thankfully) uneventful. I think the most strange part for me is that you don't taxi down a runway, but rather just go directly up or down.


At any rate, in about ten or fifteen minutes, the ride was over as we landed on the platform:



Being on an oil platform was another first for me, but once you forgot about where you were, I thought it was just like being on a research ship with lots of stairways and floors and doors to various hallways, so that you had to kind of learn your way around the lay of the land.


After we finished setting putting everything together and setting it up



the tide began to come in, bringing a lot of ice with it which made it feel like we were the ones moving rather than the other way around. (The orange pod is an escape capsule for the platform, although I'm not sure how well it would aid in an escape if it is dropped onto an ice floe rather than the water's surface.)

I didn't take many pictures at the third site we set up other than the one of Mt. Redoubt above. I suppose by that time I was tired of taking pictures, and really just tired in general. Toward the end of any trip, I'm really just ready to sleep in my own bed and return to my regular routine. We returned from this one exhausted and by driving the nine hours back to Fairbanks on Easter Sunday.