Author: greg

Well – things have been going up and down recently, although the metaphor of the rollercoaster is probably a bit exaggerated – I am still pretty happy.

Good news are that I can and will stay at McGill with my current research group for another year. Things need to get tied up and finally my output should be better too. It also seems that a trip into the Arctic will be possible – watch out for an update soon. A lot of discussions with knowledgeable people have encouraged me to continue with my research – it looks relevant and important. If the methodology that I (plan to) use is good enough still remains to be seen, but I definitely feel that I am on the right track.

This is also true for a journal article that got rejected, but, nevertheless, earned very positive criticism from the reviewers (except for the fact that it was submitted to the wrong journal and some other – rather minor – issues). So up and down it goes, but at the moment it just motivates me more – to get my stuff out and my thoughts straight.

Right after the symposium I have started to compile a list of potential sampling sites in the Arctic and Subarctic. At the moment I am aiming for quantity rather than quality, but once my list is filled, I will start checking out the places and contact the responsible persons.

I have already had a few suggestions from visiting scientits, people I have collaborated with, … so I am not short on places. In order to find a sound basis for decision making, I am also trying to summarize the potential research program that has been sitting in my head for a while now and is growing more and more (at least the ideas – not sure, if everything makes sense) ;). Well and I have not even thought about the money yet, except that I am going to need loads of cash.

The filament of the GC-MS ion source needs to be replaced (after only 2 months). While a colleague of mine is sorting out the details, I am busy with other things.

I have given a talk at the McGill Environmental Research Symposium and I found it to be an excellent meeting. Short talks from people with very different backgrounds (science, philosophy, education) highlighted the variety of environmental research done at McGill.

I have had very interesting discussions with several people focusing on sampling opportunities in the Arctic and possibilities for modeling the movements of particles in snow. I am currently following up on some of these issues.

Finally – after an uncounted number of phonecalls, enquiries and discissions, I have fetched the cooler with the snow samples from Barrow, AK at 8 pm from the UPS facility in Lachine, after less than 40 hours in transit. In the afternoon there were a few hectic, but successful phonecalls on order to get it released from Canadian customs in time – although I would still like to contest the $40.- GST that I had to pay (for snow?).

The reward of this effort were snow samples that were still frozen! The cooler insulated the stuff well and additional snow for insulation provided even more cooling capacity. The arrival also means that my sampling campaign is over for this season – measurements and data analysis lie ahead from now on.

Yesterday was another one with instrument time and things went well. I am still tweaking a couple of parameters (mainly injection conditions), but I am already collecting data (and I see quite a few species – some of them confirming earlier results). I am still struggling with two aspects of the measurements (that have to do with the splitless injection):

(1) Column bleeding
(2) Decay of fiber signal after desorption

I can reduce significantly (1) by choosing a short time until purging (1.5 min), but obviously my signals suffer. If I go by the typical desorption time of 5 min (resulting in purging after 5 min as well), I have a lot of column bleeding, which is not necessarily overlapping with analyte peaks, but messung up my chromatogram considerably.

The same is true for (2) – after desorption I observe a large peak of (mainly) water desorbing from my fiber. By purging early, I can avoid that some of the water is loaded onto the column, resulting in a acceptable baseline earlier (and thus making this timeframe available for additional peaks), but of course my sensitivity suffers.

Well, probably, it is going to be somewhere in the middle, although I lack a good selection criterion so far. But on the whole, it is going well.

Trying to get a cooler from Barrow to Montreal is not easy. For days now, I have called UPS, the logistics coordinator at BASC-NARL in Barrow, Canadian Customs,… in order to find out, where my cooler is. It should have arrived last Thursday, but it did not even make it on to the UPS tracking system. Finally, I had some success.

After identifying all subcontractors for UPS and calling them in Barrow, Anchorage and other places – the cooler was found. And contrary to my worst nightmares (it being stuck in a UPS storage facility in Florida in blazing sunshine) … it was still in Barrow. The contractor changed and they forget to pass my cooler on to the new guys. Well, I tried to put everything in place and the box should be on its way now – although it is still not showing up on the system (I keep my fingers crossed and the phones ringing). At least it was stored properly and if transportation is fast and smooth, everything will be alright.

Finally, all administrative problems were solved (although I still keep my fingers crossed until I receive them in person) and the samples from Barrow should be on their way to Montreal today. With a bit of luck (and the skills of UPS) they should be here by Thursday.

I have been constantly in touch with the researcher, who has collected the samples for my and it was a good experience. He has collected quite a few samples for me (although not as many as I had hoped for, due to the circumstances he encountered at Point Barrow – c’est la vie). Anyway I am looking forward to receiving some frost flower samples (together with snow samples) for analysis of VOC. That is going to be interesting.

It was the last trip of the year – I went sampling to Parc Tremblant, which is about a 2 1/2 hour drive north of Montreal. The snow water content was already very high and the metamorphism of the snow advanced. Snow temperature was almost uniform in the first 15 cm. There is not snowmobiliing the park during winter, so pollutants should be considerably reduced. Additionally, it is far from larger cities and there is not much to the West either.

The weather was great and I had no problems sampling at 5 different spots in the park (40 samples in total). Only a few trails were open due to the melting season, but it was enough for me. I have sampled up a mountain (about 250 m up from Lac Monroe and near a smaller lake (Lac-des-Femmes). I am now pretty confident in using my protocol, so everything went smoothly. I hope to get additional meteorological data from Tremblant, which is the next Environment Canada meteorological station.

After a long day, I was able to bring my samples back to the lab still frozen and in original state, where I put them into a freezer immediately. Nice. So – with the last samples coming in from Alaska this week, my collection will be complete; I have more than enough to do over the summer.

After a cold kept me from doing work for a while, I am now checking the GC-MS for VOC sensitivity. From my last experiments I have learned that the purge time limit, when running in “splitless” mode, needs to be optimised (for some reason it was set to zero). I am getting a good signal, when I purge 5 min after injection (but that also leaves me with a lot of water in the system). So I am optimising the time of purging (after 30 sec, 1 min, 2 min,…) to find out the best time.

I am also preparing another (last) sampling trip for the beginning of next week. I hope to find some more snow on the northern slopes of the Laurentides, north of Montreal. In the city, most of the snow is gone now. Sampling in Alaska, which is done by Samuel Morin (thanks!) is also going well. I hope I am able to get that UPS account number that I have applied for a week ago soon, so that shipping back is not a problem.