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| The recreational airport club overlooking Ushuaia Bay and downtown Ushuaia |
After a bit of a hiatus I return to describe what may be my last trip to Tierra del Fuego. Since I've last updated this blog, quite a bit has happened:
- I've measured more samples (including fish!)
- I've passed my qualifying exam (hooray!)
- I've moved universities from Environmental Systems at UC Merced to Earth Sciences at UC Riverside (possibly invalidating my qualifying exam)
- and, finally, I've returned to Ushuaia for (maybe) the last time
But what opportunity awaits while I'm here! I've got some big plans. Next week I'll be traveling to Harberton Ranch to collect water and kelp samples, which eventually should help me do some forensics on where my fur seals, sea lions, fish and other members of the marine food web spent their time (open ocean or kelp forest? Beagle Channel, Atlantic, or Southern Ocean?) At the same time I'll be helping a fellow grad student who has been collecting rocks in a radial fashion around an archaeological site to identify their availability for making tools.
In about a week and a half, I'll be leaving for Peninsula Mitre, the easternmost point of the Island of Tierra del Fuego. There are no roads to this place, and my colleagues normally reach this place by helicopter. However, we'll be taking the scenic route by horse which will take 3-4 days each way. Very few scientists use horses in their fieldwork these days, so it'll be harkening back to the days of old adventuring. Some French tourists may be accompanying us for the ride, so it'll surely be an interesting experience. I'll be journaling the experience and sharing with you all when I return!
The primary objective of traveling to this place is to collect fur seal and sea lion remains from industrial seal hunting that occurred during the 20th century. So far I've previously looked at fur seal and sea lion remains produced at indigenous archaeological sites, dating from roughly 6000 years ago to the 1700s. I expect to see significant changes in the diets of these animals as human influences changed from subsistence hunting to wholesale slaughter, but I'll find out when we return with the samples to the lab. I'll also be collecting more water and kelp samples, while my archaeologist colleagues will be digging some test pits to compare cultural differences between ancient sites on the peninsula versus sites to the west in the Beagle Channel.
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| An inset historic map from James Cook's expedition, one of the first European explorers to document the area. Note that north is pointing to the right on this map and, that the Beagle Channel has not yet been identified. We'll be riding to the far western edge to the Strait of Marie (Detroit de le Maire). I've analyzed some samples from the area labeled "Baye de Valentin" and "Terre des Etats" already (Valentine's Bay, or Bahia Valentin and Staaten Island, or Isla de los Estados today). |
Finally, I've spent a bit of time thinking about my PhD journey over the past several weeks and thought I'd share a bit about the process. I came in starting this degree with an idea for my PhD thesis fairly well formed within the first few months of starting at Merced. Those original ideas have shifted as logistics and preliminary data came into view. The questions I originally set out to ask changed and become more focused since the broader questions turned out to be more difficult to answer than expected. This realization required me to think about different types of methods to be used, the learning of new tools to help answer those questions and the number, and all the while scale and scope of the project increased. But it's this process that I think is probably the core of what a PhD is about: to come up with good questions and find a way to answer them, given limited time and resources. Of course, this sort of thing takes some planning so I made a timeline to illustrate it. Just in case you might considering a PhD, maybe you will find this helpful!
