Austral Weeks

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Weather Station Installation

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Finally time to head to the field! Our site is, fortuitously, not located in the rainy coastal mountains, but far inland towards the Argentinian pampas, and constitutes the headwaters of the Río Coyhaique that supplies the city’s water. The area is dominated by various forms of deforestation:  the initial burning to make room for sheep when the area was first settled in the middle of the 20th century, and then recent cutting to provide firewood for the city of Coyhaique . The drive is pure magic, rolling hills of golden grass radiating from soil hummocks, the rare wetlands host white swans, pink flamingos. It is deep autumn and the lengas ( nothofagus pumilio ) glow orange in the understory while the ñires ( nothofagus antarctica ) crown the canopy with fiery flecks of red. Day 1: We head into the deforested watershed and look for a site for the first weather station – we have two stations, one for this watershed and another for the native forest nearby. I pick a windswept s...
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Needle Ice

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Needle ice forms when the ground is warmer than the air: the temperature gradient creates a pressure gradient, which draws water out of the soil in needle-like formations. As a Coyhaique resident pointed out to me, the formation of needle ice is highly-dependent on soil texture: they observed needle ice on organic, porous, saturated soils. This aligns with our technical understanding: in order for ice to form at the surface, a steady supply of liquid water is required from below, which involves two factors: 1. Capillarity: In order to prevent downward flow by gravity, water must be retained by the force of capillary action . Soils with the greatest 'capillary pressure' are those with small grain sizes. Clays have the smallest grain size, sand the largest, and silt somewhere in between. 2. Permeability: In order for water to move quickly through the soil to the surface, the soil must be permeable, that is to say, the pores must be well-connected. Clays are the least perme...
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Winter is Coming - Deforestation in the Chilean Patagonia

As the Fulbright project begins to take shape, I've been doing as much listening, observing, and learning as possible to understand what types of environmental problems exist in the Chilean Patagonia, so that our modeling can provide some useful or impactful information. (Maybe not a great way to do 'science' but I can't seem to separate myself from the emotional attachment to nature).  The most obvious issue in Coyhaique, Chile is air pollution , as the World Health Organization has identified .  As I speak to more Chileans, I have come to realize that this is not an isolated problem. The poor air quality is a symptom of a much larger political/economic dynamic: in neoliberal Chile, energy from diesel, gas, and electricity is 4, 5, and 6 times as expensive as energy from wood, respectively (Schueftan & Gonzalez, 2013), whereas in generally leftist Argentina, heavy subsidies make natural gas 10–20, 5-10, and 10-20 times cheaper than diesel, firewood, and electri...
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