After graduating from Bates in May, I started a Fulbright research project in Svalbard, an island in the Arctic. You might be wondering, what does it mean to do research or to be a researcher? The easiest way to think of it is that researchers try to answer big questions about the Earth, for example "How did the Appalachian Mountains form?" or "How much water is in the oceans?" They answer these questions by collecting and analyzing natural samples, looking at data and doing experiments.
My research project is trying to answer a couple different questions. The main question is, "How much methane (a powerful greenhouse gas) is being released into the atmosphere as glaciers melt?" I was very nervous to move to Svalbard for the summer, but at the same time I was very excited because I wanted to learn more about research in the Arctic.
While I did a lot of different work during my time in Svalbard, in this journal I’ll talk about the project I spent the most time on: weekly visits to the meltwater river of the glacier Scott Turnerbreen. At the end of every week, some of my co-workers and I went out to this site to collect water samples and take some water quality measurements.
