Winter sampling: should I stay or should I go?
February is usually the coldest month of the year. The frost and the snow has been accumulating since the last months and the daytime is still short (although getting longer little by little). Because of the winter conditions, obtaining samples is challenging, actually you are never completely sure of how the study site will look like before you arrive. Maybe temperatures rise the week before and you find everything melt, maybe the sampling day is so windy that you struggle to write personal notes, or maybe (when you are lucky) all things goes as planned.
As a human, it is difficult to think that a living being could survive a harsh environment such as a frozen soil.
Furthermore, we cannot even imagine the possibility of surviving in an area full of contaminants. However, unlike us, microbes have the ability to withstand a wide variety of conditons, in other words, they can be found everywhere. This is the reason of why we decided to do this trip: to seek for microbes that inhabit polluted mining areas during the coldest season of the year.
The field trip to the first mine went smoothly, but not for this reason less exciting. We did not have any inconvinience when collecting the samples but, as expected, the landscape looked completely different to the scene we saw during late-summer time. In order to reach the soil, this time we had to remove a layer of snow. Surprinsingly, in the sampling points, large part of the soil was thaw, but it was still a successful day as we managed to get a frozen portion for our analyses.
Couple of days later, we packed our equipment once again but this time to spend one week sampling in a remote mining area. Questions like: "how cold is it going to be?"; "how deep is going to be the frozen soil layer?" or the most important "do we have everything we need?" were hanging around in our heads.
The first day was not an easy one.
It was much colder than we expected (around -27°C) but with an amazing nordic sun that kept us warmer. We carried two sleds full of tools and sample collectors and, after skiing for a little while, we reached our different study sites.
Tis time, we had to use an ice pick tool (tuura in finnish) to reach deeper layers of soil. It is frustrating to think that you are very close to the soil depth of your interest, but still far, considering that everything is freezing. In this way, ffter few hours outdoors, we managed to get everything done and came back to the cottage.
The second day we just had one aim: reach the one and only sampling point and make a hole of around 50 cm. It may not sound a very complex task, however the exciting part relied on the arrival to the site. The closest parking spot was about three kilometers (surrounded by hills) to our study location, thus we had to planned very well our strategy.
After few hours of skiing, fall onto the snow and pulling the sled up and down, we reached our destination. With the practice we got from the previous days, digging the frozen soil was not particularly difficult this time, but we still need to put a lot of effort to do it in the most effective way. We used the ice pick to break the soil tailings and the drill to get as much material as possible. This day can be considered a success as in the end we managed to get microbial samples from the frozen surface to 40 cm depth.
Now, I am in the car looking to the snowy trees from the window and smelling a mix of working boots and coffee we took in our last stop. We are talking about how curious we are to see how the microbial communities will change their behavior because of the winter conditions. I am glad to come back to the university with the bags full of samples and data to analyse. But, above all, I feel grateful of the places we saw and the unique experiences we lived these days.
