Authors: Maria Tzortziou & Sherry Aine Te Photos by Alana Menendez and Kyle Turner Over the past week, the Tzortziou Group and collaborators from NRL and NASA have been collecting measurements aboard the R/V Ukpik to monitor the changing riverine fluxes and water quality in Alaska’s North Slope coastline - a region of high vulnerability to changes in the Arctic, characterized by increasing coastal erosion, permafrost thaw, rapid melting of snow and ice, and changing hydrological flow patterns... Good weather conditions have allowed the crew to successfully sample 14 coastal and offshore stations so far. Water optical, chemical and biogeochemical parameters have been collected, including concentrations of nutrients, dissolved and particulate carbon, phytoplankton pigments, and water reflectance.
A major goal of the team is to combine these datasets with measurements of the “color” of the water retrieved from aircraft and satellite sensors, to characterize and understand larger scale ecological processes and shifts along the highly vulnerable coastal Arctic Ocean.
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