Trapped at the Fred Meyer gas station

Today Rachel accidentally locked Ingrid in the car at the gas station. She'd just given Ingrid a snack so our little girl sat there unperturbed in the carseat eating craisins and goldfish as the windows slowly frosted over (it was -30F).

There wasn't a phone in the gas-shack so Rachel told the gas attendant to watch the car while she ran into Fred Meyer. The police department told her they could come, but their only mode of entry was to break the window. "Call a taxi, they always have door opening equipment," the dispatcher said (when I heard this I was deeply disappointed in the Fairbanks PD, though the bright side of their complacency is that I don't know anyone who has gotten a traffic ticket in Fairbanks).

Ten minutes later a cabby came, wearing short sleeves and no gloves (no joke). By this time Ingrid's breath had thoroughly encrusted the inside of all the windows so the grumpy man couldn't see the lock controls. After ten minutes of scrambling, prying, and poking the door swung open.

"Here's your daughter back. That'll be 35 bucks."

Here's Ingrid with her imaginary friend Jailey. Rachel didn't tell the cab driver Jailey was also in the car for fear he'd charge her more.

You've reached Ben Abbott at 907-45. . .

Why do people restate their number in their voice-mail messages? There are plenty of useful things we could be including in our messages. A few years ago my brother turned his message into a weekly trivia quiz:

"This is Sam. How many Nieuport 17 fighter planes were made during WWII? Last week's answer: Rene Descartes." 

But your phone number? That's the one piece of information you can be sure every caller already has..

I wonder how many minutes are spent annually listening to the restatement of phone numbers. I wonder how much AT&T made on that last year.

If any of you are number-restaters, or have insight into number-stater psychology, please phone me up. My voice-mail greeting will let you know the number to call.

Currivulum Vitae

This morning I opened up my C.V. to update a few things and correct a misplaced comma. By chance I scrolled to the top of the page and noticed the first word on the document was "Currivulum." 

"That's weird, I thought C.V. stood for Curriculum Vitae, Latin for 'the course of one's life'." A quick Google search revealed that I was right, which meant that I was wrong (and had been for a long time). I quickly opened several old C.V.s and, sure enough, since 2007, I've been sending out my Currivulum Vitae. At least it makes me less self conscious about the comma.

AGU talk titles

It's the final day of the American Geophysical Union fall meeting. Every year 20,000 scientists get together to exchange new research. Here are some of my favorite titles from the past few days:

• Soil Chemical Weathering and Nutrient Budgets along an Earthworm Invasion Chronosequence in a Northern Minnesota Forest

• Acupunctural Afforestation for Desertification Mitigation over Semi-Arid Regions in East Asia

• Decomposition is always temperature dependent, except when its not

• Feeding the World While Sustaining the Planet: Building Sustainable Agriculture Within the Earth System

• Translating Watersheds Into Trustworthy Hydrological Models

• Four Billion Years of Marine Nitrogen Cycling

• Reduced Nitrous Oxide Emissions in Tomato Cropping Systems under Drip Irrigation and Fertigation

First scientific pub

My first scientific publication went out this morning in the comments section of Nature. I think you need a subscription to download it but here's a link to the article,

Climate change: High risk of permafrost thaw

Arctic tundra just north of the continental divide in the Brooks range

There has been a much bigger response than I expected (I mean, I think this stuff is cool and important but I didn't realize how interested the science journalism community would be).

Here's a link to the Institute of Arctic Biology's "in the news" site with some articles about the article!

The take home nuggets from the article are:

1. The amount of organic matter stored in permafrost-region soils is huge-around 1700 gigatonnes. This is twice as much carbon as is in the atmosphere, four times what humans have emitted since the industrial revolution, and (this is the one that gets me) more carbon than exists in all living things (pile up all the blue whales, redwoods, termites, and bacteria and they won't equal the northern soil pool).

2. This carbon is there because of chilly soils. Any spruce needles, dead roots, or squirrel bodies that fall into the soil are refrigerated (or frozen completely) which slows decomposition.

3. As the climate warms a portion of this soil carbon will be released as carbon dioxide and methane (two of the major greenhouse gases). Because this release will come from remote and distributed landscapes it will be particularly difficult to contain. We estimate that carbon from the permafrost region will have more than twice the impact on global climate than carbon released by deforestation over the next century. However, emissions from fossil fuels are predicted to remain the biggest driver of climate change. Permafrost carbon simply amplifies the impact of greenhouse gases we emit. The estimates we generated indicate that this extra carbon could increase the impact of human emissions by 20-30%.

Thermokarst feature where permafrost has collapsed near the Toolik Field Station. This thaw slump formed in three months this summer.

Old Ben Franklin is right in this case, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." 

Doorknob

I don’t know if you know this, but toddlers aren’t bothered by toot smells. It’s not that they don’t know they’re there. At dinner tonight I asked for some Gorgonzola. “I want some,” Ingrid asked nicely. I broke off a piece with my fork and Ingrid popped the musty chunk into her mouth. She started to giggle and said, “It kinda smells like a little toot.” So, if they can smell it, why doesn’t it bother them?

Think about how picky infants and toddlers can be about tastes, and taste is mostly smell, but when pappa rips a fruity one, or mamma hisses out a wet-cardboard walrus burp Ingrid just goes on playing. It really is the best of all possible worlds for her. She gets to laugh at the sound, experience the smell but not be bothered by it, and laugh at those who seem to be suffering from the haze. 

So is disgust at flatulence a learned response? That seems pretty radical, I mean it's a flavor that seems natural to dislike, but on the other hand it's a scent that we have been around for a long time (evolutionarily speaking). Could go either way, but I bet that we learn to wrinkle our noses when the guy in the elevator squeaks one out on the first floor. I bet the disgust wouldn't have occurred to us if we hadn't seen other people responding so negatively to every fart, toot, and flattle. 

Free your minds. Breath it all in. Oh yeah. . . doorknob.

I've gotten frostbite twice in the last week. A tiny circle on my neck last Monday and a tiny circle on my nose today.

The damage

The feeling of frostbite is terrible. It's stealthy like a sunburn in that you don't sense it until the damage is already advanced. Between -10 and -20 is the danger range. Any colder than that and I completely cover up. Any warmer and things get cold but don't freeze.

I'll be riding along and feel an uncomfortable sting on a patch of exposed skin. After several minutes of ignoring the discomfort there is a moment where the zing pinches and bites deeper into the tissue. Flesh freezes with astounding speed. It's like a gerbil bite. You know how they will nibble your finger playfully, pressing their teeth gently on your skin first,  and then BAM, the teeth clamp shut and the sharp square incisors sink into your skin. That's what it's like, a bunch of tiny gerbils that all bite at the same time.

This morning it was -30 and I knew the gerbils would have their teeth bared so I covered up. On my ride in to work I didn't have any troubles with my skin but my front shifter did freeze up and I had to mash up the hill to campus in the biggest chainring. I had some business on lower campus (had to drop off the newly finished two person pedal-powered generator). I dropped off the gear, chatted with Frank about his almost ripe baby and walked back outside. The ride from lower campus to my office only takes three minutes.

"I don't need my balaclava it's only three minutes and it has warmed up to -15." I stepped onto the bike, my face warm and moist from my involuntary sprint up the hill. Moist skin is to frostbite what a dude with a chihuahua and a GoPro camera on a surfboard is to Jaws. Bad news for my chihuahua. Even well below zero, water wont crystalize into ice until it finds a nucleation particle--an ice seed. Moisture on skin, especially perspiration with all its tasty compounds provides plenty of seeds.

In front of the museum the gerbils sunk their teeth. "Ouch!" I chirped and grabbed my nose. Even through my thick mountaineering mitten I could feel the stiffness. I pulled my hand out of the mitten and sure enough, the tip of my nose and the tops of my nostrils were stiff like the corner of a plastic milk jug. Hand to my face I hammered to the top of the hill (still in my darn highest gear) and ran into the office. Not sure if my nose had just felt stiff or if it was really frozen I grabbed my little frostbite prevention mirror (after my first frostbite incident Rachel brought in a mirror to the office so I could make sure my headgear was giving proper coverage before heading out). The skin initially looked fine but as the minutes went by, the nose turned pink and puffy. I do wonder why, even though the whole top of the nose was solid when I touched it, I only got a blister at the very tip.

On the subject of frostbite mirrors and frostbite viewing in general, I've only seen my own still-frozen frostbite once. Last spring, when I walked in the door after riding up the hill Rachel screamed,
"Your nose your nose your nose! Quick, fix it!" I jumped into the bathroom and caught just a glimpse of the fast shrinking pure white spot on my nose.

Last night we saw a homeless-looking man standing next to his bike outside of Fred Meyers. He had a dirty down coat, jeans, and tennis shoes. It was -27. He was wearing plastic grocery bags as a second layer of socks--one from Fred Meyers and one Walmart. I have a place to go, money to buy protective clothing, and a frostbite mirror, because I have connections and resources. He doesn't and now his tissues are vulnerable to ice crystals. None of his friends are on LinkedIn. The thought of our system leaving his tissues exposed to the deadly air made me want to break down and cry. Ingrid and I went to get him a deli burrito but he was gone when we got back. For him it wasn't just his nose and neck that the wind could rip up but his thighs, toes, and fingers. I wanted to give him all my clothes. One December, when I was a missionary in northern France, my sister Maren sent me a pair of soft leather gloves. I gave them to a man on the street who said he'd give them back in the spring for me to keep till the next fall. My sister is incredibly giving-fiercely tender.

As we did our shopping I found myself singing Bob Dylan's "Only a Hobo" as a sort of prayer. The link is to a Slovenian music site (there weren't any versions on Youtube).