July 10: Home on the Kotuy River

Ordovician sediments on the Kotuy River

Ben and Roma, ultra-cool field geologists

Mosquito Quotient: 17
Number of Laxatives Still in Play: 16
Rock Skipping Record: Ben, 13
Average Temperature in the Sun: 80 degrees (!!)
Campfires Built:1
Giant Flesh-Eating Bee-flies Killed Inside Seth’s Tent: 3
Number of Time Seth has Cursed About the Giant Bee-flies: >3
Clouds Today: 0

==============================================

We were slated to leave at 5 PM today from Khatanga aboard a large, slow boat that would take us as far as Kayak. A “speedboat” of the Khatanga variety was supposed to take us another two hours upriver, where the larger vessel couldn’t go. We didn’t actualy leave until 9 PM, after waiting for fuel, switching boats, and picking up a couple of extra crew members (namely a recent mother and her year-old son).

While we waited to get going, we had plenty of time to play poker. Unfortunately we didn’t have any poker chips, so we had to make do with individually wrapped laxative tablets. Deuces wild!

The small boat could only carry half our gear and half our party. So after six hours of chugging upriver,we dropped anchor and transferred Roma, Volodia, and Anton plus the essential camp-building gear (including the giant canvas “Chateau de Volodia”). Four hours later the small boat returned for the rest of us.

Finally, at 8 AM, our trusty speedboat edged in towards a sloping gravel bank, where Anton had already built a fire and cooked breakfast. We pitched our tents on a thin band of grass and wildflowers, between the river and a small creek running out of the woods.Looking south from the campfire we could see spectacular red and white cliffs of Ordovician siltstones, mudstones, and marls. We spent the remainder of the day sampling a series of mafic dikes that cut through the cliff-face. Tomorrow we will sample a mafic sill that crops out down river and we will prepare the rafts for the rest of our time on the Kotuy.

Despite the all-night boatride and the sudden arrival of giant biting bee-flies, we really are excited to sleep outside tonight and to know that we will be doing geology tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that…

July 8th: American Adventures on a Siberian Internet Connection

You may have noticed, if you have been following the blog posts, that the last three were long and a bit out of order. We typed them on our field computer, and then Volodia obtained permission for us to use the internet at Polar Expeditions in Khatanga. Which turned out to mean that we had to kick one of the employees of Polar Expeditions off her computer while we used it to make our blog posts. And–how surprising–the internet runs a bit slowly in Siberia. So she stood there looking a bit impatient while we were uploading photos of stuffed wolverines.  We also felt a bit pressured for time after the first computer she let us use didn’t work and the second would only type in Russian.  Sorry if the previous posts were confusing…and if you’re a bit squeamish, you may want to skip the post directly beneath this.

As we entered the Polar Expedition offices, Volodia met with our motor boat pilot (captain?) and we were informed that we will leave Thursday the 9th at 5:00pm.  This fantastic news means that we will be leaving the comfy accomodations of Khatanga in favor of the banks of the Kotuy river.  This and all further blog posts will be made via our satellite phone data-uplink function. If it works, and it no doubt has if you are reading this, we will be “faxing” an email via the phone to Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Ben’s advisor at MIT and one heck of a nice lady (and a principal investigator on the project), who will post them on the blog for us. Thanks Lindy!!

Finally, you can send short text messages for free to our Iridium satellite phones, though we can’t reply. So if you feel like sending us a good geology joke (we have been exchanging them with Anton), just go to: messaging.iridium.com (We think that’s the website, but we’re not sure, and we can’t go on the internet to check, so you may have to google it) and type a message to:

8816 3164 1157 (Seth) or
8816 3154 7593 (Ben)

The next post will be from the field!!!

The word of the day is Cherviac (Maggots!)

When Volodia went to retrieve the rafts, which were stored for the winter here in Khatanga, he discovered that the owner of the storage shed had piled caribou and fish on top of the rafts and then forgotten about them; for the entire season.  It has been warm here for quite a while. The rafts were crawling with maggots and festooned with pupae.

 When we opened the bags, of which there were many, a foul stench gurgled out. It was as if the essence–the pure distillation–of putrefied, rotten caribou blood were being poured down our throats. Gulp. We pulled each raft from its bag, and a wet patter of maggots fell like heavy rain onto the sidewalk. Thousands of white maggots, each about an inch long, squirmed helplessly in piles on the ground. They lifted up their tiny translucent heads and their six stubby, tubby forearms and waved them in the air.  When we lifted up the hollow raft paddles, a cupful of maggots slid out of the open end. Seth insisted the smell was like cat urine, only cat urine that had been mixed with mammoth brains and then left in the sun to sizzle.

 Although traumatized, Ben and Seth were slightly less wounded than the Russians, who intended to call these tents home for the next month.

 The mosquitoes, in a resounding buzz that Ben assured us sounded like “Carpe Diem!!”, began swarming around us, so that the mosquito quotient, with which you are now familiar, was off our recently developed scale. In addition to the maggots, yes there is more, there were thick clusters of pupae glued by (and filled with) coagulated pus to every surface of the rafts. The wettest parts of the rafts, the parts that had been soaking in dead caribou juice, were encrusted with tiny oblong fly eggs.  Fantastic.

 To sum this up, at 10:00 PM in 75 degree weather, we were cleaning boats and tents covered in maggots and pus-filled pupae,  all the while being feasted upon by mosquitoes a-plenty. 

 The upshot of this work? (1) Everything is now “clean” and ready for use. (2) Volodia now knows (and loves) the phrase “We should let this air out…”

Number of clothing items changed in the past 6 days: 0.

We have decided to add some statistics to our blog posts in order to convey the state of the expedition in a nutshell. These will be updated as conditions change.

Mosquito Quotient (equal to the number of mosquitoes you can kill with one slap): 4*
Number of mosquitoes eaten: Ben 4, Seth 1.
Hot Sauce Remaining: 2.8 bottles
Russian words we have mispronounced: tva million (two million?)
Ben’s favorite Russian language exercise: counting from one to five happy, healthy caribou.
Seth’s favorite: Laughing at Anya’s face when she hears Ben attempt to say 4 happy healthy caribou.
Boats inflated: 2.5
Boats defated: 2.5
Boats deflated on purpose: 1.5

*Although the carnage on the wall above Ben’s bed would suggest the Mosquito Quotient is more like a 10. And a late night outdoor boat cleaning (which will de discussed in detail in a later post) suddenly increased the quotient to somewhere in the ballpark of 15.

Would you like ham-cheese with your chicken liver?

 

At midnight in Khatanga it is sunny and hot. Great for tanning, bad for sleeping.

 We flew in on a two-propeller cargo plane from Krasnoyarsk to Khatanga. A substantial portion of the cargo space was devoted to our expedition’s gear: duffels of food, canvas bags with raft parts, backpacks full of sample bags. The other passengers looked at us like we were crazy. After ferrying the bags from holding room to holding room all day, we were beginning to agree with them.  For the next six and a half hours, through the constant roar of the engines, we jolted and swooped over the expansive Siberian taiga. The stewardess on that rinky dink little airplane was apparently very dedicated to her job, because by the time we landed she had come through the aisle five or six times with her tray of orange sodas and caramels and served us a lunch of celophane-wrapped goodness (see title). The landing itself involved several bounces, which Seth, seated directly across from the landing gear, watched warily through the window, and then, after a long screeching skid, we had arrived.

 

One of the first things you notice about Khatanga is that there is roughly one store for each inhabitant.  These tiny stores are all open at different times and each carries roughly the same list of goods. Canned goods, dry goods, smoked fish, beer, etc. Our favorite brand of beer so far is called Bagbier (pronounced Bugbier). There are small shacks with three stores on the bottom level. Larger buildings with stores on multiple levels. One building, the Khatanga equivalent of a Wal-Mart, boasts no fewer than 8 stores, including: a suspiciously smelly mini-grocery, a place we think might have been a casino, and an amazing sporting goods store with camouflage suits, machine guns, stuffed wolverines, and posters of bikini-clad AK-47 wielding women on the walls.

Upon arrival yesterday, Volodia took us on a tour of some of the stores so that we could familirize ourselves with the differing milk prices from one end of town to the other and have input on that night’s supper.  Dinner = lunch.  Supper = dinner.  Volodia is a man of discerning taste in all things, especially Cognac.  At each store he examined the bottles, stewed a bit, handed them back, and we moved on.  Finally, at a store next to another store and adjacent to yet another, Volodia purchased two smoked fish and a bottle of the finest Cognac that Khatanga has to offer.  At supper, Anton found the glasses and Valodia observed, “In France, they drink Cognac only after the meal, but in Russia, we drink before, during, and after!” After a short pause, Seth said “aren’t we in Russia?”  We drank. 

 The toilet at “The Geologists’ Barracks” can only be flushed with a bottle of water. A big bottle of water.  Although Seth was responsible for this discovery, in no way was he the cause of the malfunction (editor’s note: this is what Seth claims, anyway. 2ns editors note: The first editor knows the second editor is innocent!!). 

Roma, Volodia, Anya, and Anton spent today preparing for the field–gathering equipment and boats, making arrangements for the helicopter, and registering with the local authorities. The Americans helped out in whatever ways we could. At one point, Volodia said maybe we would take a hovercraft upstream to the Maymecha, but that idea was eventually scrapped in favor of the [slightly] more reliable, but more expensive, helicopter.

We now plan to take motorboats up the Kotuy on either Thursday the 9th or Friday the 10th–everyone is very eager to start sampling.

We’ve got a free day… Let’s find the bumper cars!

We had a free day today while we waited for our flight to Krasnoyarsk tomorrow morning. We took the metro downtown. Seth used his first moments in Red Square to squat and pretend to be a Cossack soldier (see photo above). We saw Red Square, Lenin’s tomb, the Kremlin, and Moscow State University–a few of Moscow’s major attractions. Along the way we had a bride- spotting contest. The rules were simple: you had to see the white dress, and if you falsely shouted out that you saw a bride, you lost a point. By the end of the day, Ben only had a narrow lead, despite a streak of six brides in a row in Red Square. The final total: Ben, 12; Seth, 10. Whenever the brides grew scarce, we switched to spotting mullets, which were always plentiful. In this contest Seth came out way, way ahead. All of this mullet-spotting has convinced Seth that the mullet is a haircut he cannot live without. His major goals for this trip are now: (1) to find as many dateable rocks as possible from the Traps, and (2) to grow enough party in the back to qualify him for Mullet Elite status.

One of the major highlights for the day, however, was definitely the dilapidated and half-abandoned amusement park we came across on our way back to the hotel. We were concerned that we were slightly taller than most of the other patrons–would we be allowed to ride? The ticket taker assured us that if we paid 40 rubles (about $1.50) we could take whichever rides we wanted. Ben shoved aside several small children in his haste to board the Crazy Bus, which (as you can see from the picture above) was definitely pretty crazy.

After Ben’s stomach regained its composure, we focused our attention on convincing the attendant that we could indeed fit into the bumper cars. Success. As you may well know, choosing the correct bumper car from the fleet is crucial. Ben went for the darkhorse Samurai in pink. Seth, being the patriot he is, went for the clear alpha car in red, white, and blue. Turns out that the pink car was well-tuned and the patriot-mobile was on its last leg. Regardless, the impacts were fierce.

Although today was lots of fun, we are getting antsy and we are definitely ready to get in the field to do what it is we are here to do.

Moscow: The Arrival

We are sucessfully in Moscow!!  We flew over Greenland on the way, and saw the fringes of the ice sheet calving into the North Atlantic. A few black nunataks punched up through the glacier. The picture at the top left gives you a ballpark idea of how spectacular the view was.

Overall the flight went very smoothly. Our bags were searched in Boston and drew laughter from the TSA agents because they could not believe that we wanted to take 50 pounds of plastic bags to Russia (“You don’t have … Seven rolls of tape in your backpack, do you?”).  Seth was stopped and searched in Moscow, resulting in more laughter–partly because of the bewildered look on his face when the customs officer started talking to him in Russian, and partly because the X-Ray revealed that he was ferrying 12 hammers in a heavily fortified suitcase.

Volodia’s daughter Marina was nice enough to meet us at the airport, get us a car, accompany us to our hotel, check us in, and get us into our room.  As a thank-you, Ben has promised to bring back some caribou for her from Khatanga–either a head or a leg, her choice.  After checking in, we met with Roma and Anya for a traditional Russian dinner where Ben had borscht and Seth ate a pattied version of chicken with pulverized potatoes.  We also gave Roma the hammers we brought for him…he was really really excited about his new hammers.

After dinner Roma and Anya described the plan for the next few days. We will be flying to Krasnoyarsk early Sunday morning. We will stay overnight in Krasnoyarsk and then catch our flight to Khatanga. These two flights will take a total of 10 hours–which gives you a sense of the shocking size of this country. The total flying time from Boston to Khatanga will by then be 22 hours.

From Khatanga we will take motorboats directly upstream on the Kotuy river towards the Ordovician and Devonian red cliffs, passing our first outcrops of flood basalt on the way. Bring on the rocks!

Departure: July 2

9:01 AM in Boston. We (Seth and Ben) will be heading to the airport in a little under an hour. So far the list of things we will have to find along the way is not too long: fish hooks, Russian outlet adapters, a wristwatch.

We weighed our bags this morning. We have 38 pounds of nuts and ClifBars, 30 pounds of rock hammers, and 2 life jackets. Plus a few other things.

It’s hard not to be excited at this moment… in a few days (if all goes well) we will be on the Kotuy river, where we took the above picture last year. Here’s the current weather in Khatanga, our base town in Siberia: http://www.weathercity.com/ru/khatanga/ … not so bad at the moment.