Science Notes November 4th

Nathalie Cabrol

By all means, a wonderful day in the Alteplano, and a busy one too. The physiology team and subjects came back to the refuge after spending two days at lower elevations to study adaptation to altitude with and without medication (Diamox).It was good to meet up with the rest of the team and hear outstanding news: the UV dosimeter that we had left last year had collected UVA, UVB, PAR (photoshythesis) and temperature data every ten minutes over the entire period.

The results are astounding and worth all of the time and effort we put in. The biology team members look like kids in the proverbial candy store: moving from one spring to another, from the field to the microscope, and making plans to make every single day as full as possible. Only a few days into the expedition, we can claim some great successes in several areas.

I kept some great news for the end. Our equipment, that had been held up in Chilean customs for the last two weeks will finally make it to the refuge on Saturday or Sunday. We had to rearrange our plans to accommodate this delay, but, as a well-organized group, there will be no time lost.

Finally, I would hate to forget an important part of the afternoon while a lot of the team was busy working at Laguna Blanca doing maintenance on UV plate stations and sampling, I drafted part of the physiology team (my revenge for two days of intensive electrodes and CPOD scrutiny) to Laguna Verde to find a good site to reposition a UV plate station that was blown away. Very efficient, those boys-- they have started building a 1/50th scale version of the Great Wall of China (with lava rocks) to protect the area against 100 km/hr gusts that are fairly common there. In the process, we also visited the nearly dozen new hydrothermal springs that appeared this year in the north shore of Laguna Verde. Amazing! What a diversity of life, pigments, morphologies we are in for a very exciting science campaign.

Signing off for today,
Nath