I am driving yesterday from Fairbanks to Valdez along the Richardson HWY.

Weather was again perfect! at Thompson Pass!  But… datalogger was dead by the snowmelt water. Hope I can get data from chip, when I back at home.

A lot of water at Bridal fall.

GLOBE workshop is held at UAF. Many village teachers are here and great to meet again!

Our “permafrost” book’s “Extreme temperature” pages completed by including Death Valley Data!

The Death Valley’s ground temperature in 2009-2010 was normal but not extreme. Highest we got little less than 70 degree Celsius. Also it never hit below freezing point. The following plot is ground surface temperature from Bad Water (lowest point in US) and sand dune (50km north of bad water). X-axis indicate date and y-axis is temperature in degree Celsius.

This is trumpet curve from Bad Water. You can see y-axis as depth in meter and x-axis as temperature in degree Celsius. Mean ground temperature at 3m below ground is about 27 degree Celsius.

One of the hottest places on planet  in Death Valley, California, USA, where it got up to 57.8 °C on July 10, 1913.

Death Valley is also lowest place (-85m below sea level) in western hemisphere.

Small standing water is located at Bad Water (lowest spot). It is very salty water, you can not drink! But when the watching water carefully, it is some creature in the water!

We have a borehole here in lowest spot! I will upload data tomorrow!

The time for leaving Death Valley. Bad storm is approaching.

Summer goes very quick! especially in Alaska. We will have snow another 13 weeks (maybe…). Our Kilimanjaro trip also not too far away anymore. Only 4 months to go. We should prepare guide book, physical exercise, ticket, visa etc.

Here is some focus site in this year’s trip. We try to look at detail vegetation, temperature above 4000m organic rich area that showing dark color in following image.

Also red color in this picture!

Bruce is retired driller and super tech at CRREL. During my visiting in New Hampshire area, I had a great time to meet Bruce!  He remember many drill operation at North Slope. And now he has cool coffee collection!

Dear Science Teachers and Principals,

Thank you for supporting our program. Most of the students must be excited about the approaching end semester!  We had a great number of responses regarding frost tube depths. We will compile and develop class lessons during teacher workshops this summer.
Here is a recent update of our program:

1.    Some teachers are probably moving to different communities. If you know your new location and new e-mail address, please let me know. I can update our mailing list.

2.    We will plan to update Google Earth permafrost files during this summer season. You will have over 150 schools data throughout Google Earth. If you have not installed Google Earth yet, please do it. For more information, or any questions, contact me. We will also develop permafrost features on “Google Mars” soon.

3.  We will plan to go to Kilimanjaro with two Alaskan science teachers and (maybe) four students this September! This is wonderful news for me, and all of you can join this expedition throughout the Internet. We will try to set up real time Q&A, pictures, and many measurements. You will feel like you’re climbing with us. For more information, see the GLOBE Africa region<http://www.xpeditiononline.com/kili2010.html <http://www.xpeditiononline.com/kili2010.html> > . Our climbing route is attached in this letter. It will work with Google Earth (*.kmz file).
Hope all of you can join and monitor our Internet live classroom! More later.

4.    During the summer months, former Air Force pilot “Mr. Yuguchi” will back to communities! He will use a small “Husky” plane with big bush tires. If you see him in the community, don’t think he’s a stranger. His mission will be to change the batteries in the loggers and downloads data. We will try to visit over 100 schools during June to July 2010.

5.    Some schools end one or two months from now. I will try to visit these schools hopefully before school ends, such as Yukon schools, Juneau, Haines, Mosquito Lake… Also included will be summer schools in Wales, and St. Paul Island.

6.  The working  “permafrost reference book” for schools and communities progress that still projected to delivery in 2011.  However, I may publish a comic version sooner. I will start searching for archived photographs and elder’s story for each community. If you have some old pictures, or information, let me know. (http://www.ine.uaf.edu/permafrost/permafrost/p.html <http://www.ine.uaf.edu/permafrost/permafrost/p.html> ).

7. I will be away from Alaska during part of the summer: May (Death Valley , CRREL), June (Oslo IPY and searching Permafrost in Span), July (Arctic Canada), August (Tibet), September (Tanzania). But you will know where I am via the blog as well as Twitter.

Again, thank you for your participation.
Have a great summer and see you next semester!

Kenji Yoshikawa

I work with Dr. Dan Lawson (CRREL) to look for 30 years old permafrost samples from North Slope. Samples were taken in April of 1982, then sending to East Coast (CRREL). All of the scientists were retired already only Dan is still here! So we think this may be a last chance to find it! I was at here 5 years ago to look for this. But I could not at that time… But this time is little different! Dan did great work to clean up cold room! Also I have a chance to visit as many as retired person’s house around here to get their memory! This is different type of field work and fun as well!

I arrived at Boston last night. I had a time to drive around Cape Cod today. It was little windy and cold. But beautiful sky and bright green everywhere! Great things is that this is Lobster country! We got local lobster $7/lb (e.g. less than $22 for two lobsters)!! It was nice trip for weekend. I have to drive for Cold Region Research Engineer Laboratory (CRREL) New Hampshire tomorrow.

Lobster pot is a little bit different than our shrimp pot!