The pipeline runs all the way from Barrow to Val Deez through Fairbanks. At Val Deez, the crude oil is shipped to places on the West Coast for refinement. The refined oil is then imported back into Alaska for consumption. So with all this transportation, gas in Alaska is as costly as any other parts of the country. 
Since we were busy collecting data for our analysis back at Delaware, Stepanie packed us a lunch of hamburgers, French fries and chips for our trip back to Fairbanks (that is the most important box that I am carrying)
On the whole, the entire experience was really amazing and I hope I can get another chance to spend a slightly longer time on the camp.
The first release for data collection went well but on its return journey it got stuck in a keel. To finally get it free, they had to release weights along the rope to which the AUV was tethered and pull it down from the keel. During this extraction, the GPS sensor and the central control was slightly damaged, which is what is being repaired by Richard and Martin.
In some cases, the AUV could get stuck pretty tightly and that would require divers to get in to the water so as to shake it loose. When it comes to getting wet, a lot of precautions need to be taken. Typically, the water under the ice is at -2F while the air is at -20F, so any water freezes up when it comes in contact with the air. To handle all these, the divers actually wear a suit (the red suit in the picture) that has an air insulation layer over and above the regular deep sea diving attire. This combination suit protects the divers from the severe cold temperature.
There is also a "prep-hut" (the wooden box to the right) where the divers prepare themselves for the dive and after the dive thaw themselves back up. The prep-hut is maintained at a pretty high temperature for getting the divers ready for the dive.
I did not see any divers take a dive but even if i had done, i would not have been able to capture it on camera. Moving the camera into the divers tent, from the low temperature outside, fogged up my lens and ruined many of my pictures. It finally cleared out after a couple of hours and then i was back at digitizing the camp.
Lecture 2: From the ridge area, we went down to a shearing ridge for the labs :-) where we observed stalactites of brine which had gotten frozen as they tricked through the ice. One of things that you notice is the interspersed leads and ridges located all over the lab area. In many cases, leads drive right into a ridge dissipating their energy and you will notice a brand new lead taking of in a totally different direction from the ridge. 
Lecture 3: The visit to the Diving hut, for which i shall have to devote a blog altogether!!!
Once the ice is collected, the next stage is to actually melt them in a large pan in the kitchen. This could take an hour or two. Then comes the fun part, where you pour the hot water into the "2-stroke engine" and using the piston you pump the water through the faucet (picture below) . The water in the device can give you a nice supply of hot water for 15 minutes which is the maximum duration that a bath could be.
So you spend 2 hours collecting ice, 2 hours melting the ice and you get a 15 minute shower; a totally useless investment...and surely not a daily affair. It was funny because anyone who had taken their bath would hit celebrity status for that day on the camp, talk about being famous for at least 15 minutes!!! (The pictures were taken Robert Harris)
Many a times, the exhausted miner has to give up any hope of finding the elusive crystal and settle in the hope that tomorrow would be a better day, and the bath was a possibility.
By the way, I was just trying out the macabre tone of writing. All you kids out there, it is not that bad. Ice crystals are always available with a few chips into the ice mine and fresh water was plentiful while we were at the camp. The sign on the camp was interesting and later it struck me as to why i had not seen a single polar bear. The sign explicitly disallowed polar bears to come anywhere near the camp. And all the while i thought it was my 4 hour shot gun training....
For dinner on the 9th , we actually had a pretty sumptuous dinner of Chicken pesto , green beans and baked orzo. And to top it all off, Stephanie had baked us a nice carrot cake for our arrival at the ice camp. Now that is what I call a red carpet treatment!!! 
Adapted from "The charge of the light brigade" by Alfred Lord Tennyson but modified by me for specific purposes!!!
Nevertheless, the chopper ride was cool, flying at a couple of 100 feet from the ground. The best part was the in-place hovering of the chopper, while the next direction of search was being planned (The first two images are taken by Scott).
But by the end of the hour, the circular flight pattern that was being executed by the chopper had got me pretty woozy and was pretty happy to reach land.
Despite all our attempts, we could not locate the buoys. But later we heard that the dynamics at the camp was so strong that, instead of the typical 2km drift, the buoys had actually traveled 7km away from the camp.
We reached the airport at 
Finally after a loop around the camp, we touched terra firma!!!
One of the reasons that temperature inversion occurs is because warm air gets sandwiched between the cold air at very high altitudes and the air that is in close proximity to the cold surface. Thus a profile of temperature against altitude would show that the slope of the curve inverting as it goes from cold to warm to cold. The most common observation of temperature inversion is the steam rising from houses tends to form a horizontal layer of smog instead of rising all the way up.
I thought of only including details about the "cool stuff", but when some people started asking me if this whole thing was just a paid vacation, I had to step back and say "hey" it wasn’t all play and no work. This is where I pay the bill, in cash, for the "paid vacation" part of the whole trip. And as stated in most textbooks, this blog can be safely skipped without any break in the other sections... :-)
When we look at the use of satellite imagery, one thing that is seen is that typically these images are used in a "post processing" context rather than as a "real time" tool. During the field campaign, researchers deploy a number of sensors at the scene and during the post processing stage, the data from the sensors and the satellite images are analyzed so as to predict changes occurring at the location. The use of the imagery as a near real time application is limited mainly because of two reasons. The first is due to the low polar orbital repeat rate, which defines the rate at which the satellite would approximately cover the same position twice. This is usually around 1~3 days, which implies that any deformation that takes place at a frequency that is greater than 1~3 days will not be observed between an image pair. The second obstacle lies in the computational and storage requirements that are needed to handle the images (the typical size of an image from the SHEBA data set is approximately 250 MB, 15000x15000 pixels at 50m/pixel resolution). This mismatch between the high spatial resolution but low temporal resolution makes any form of real time processing difficult.
The deformation, or the motion, that take place in sea ice have certain unique characteristics such as the presence of large discontinuities, where the ice floes (a single piece of ice formed on the surface of an ocean) move apart creating "leads" or crash into each other creating "ridges". This kind of motion can actually be classified as a piecewise linear motion where each individual piece has a linear motion but the overall picture is that of a non rigid deformation. This is much like observing a human limb in motion, where each segment undergoes rigid motion but the motion of the limb on the whole is considered non rigid. The presence of this large, discontinuous non rigid motion causes many algorithms to fail when applied on the images of sea ice. To handle this kind of motion, I developed a robust motion estimation algorithm that was found to be extremely efficient and accurate. Unlike the typical products that are currently available that provide a resolution of around 5 km, this algorithm was able to capture motion at a 400m resolution, which is an order of magnitude greater than what is currently available. The preliminary prototype of the algorithm was arrived at during my Masters research and it was significantly modified to handle high noise and discontinuous motion efficiently and accurately. This was the algorithm that was applied to compute a near real time data product for the APLIS ice camp.
Description of the project
The original prototype was developed in Matlab but it was not computationally efficient though it provided us with the means to test and debug the entire estimation procedure. In order to handle the computational efficiency of the algorithm, we developed the entire system in C/C++. One of the important things that we did was to provide a high level design description of the system that we were designing using UML. This, I believe, was an important step, since it gave us a picture of the various interactions between the modules and also provided a high level understanding of the whole project. The UML modeling was done using the StarUML toolkit and the use case description for the project is shown below.
Most of the pieces were built in a bottom-up fashion starting from the motion estimation module. The motion estimation module was essentially translated from my Matlab implementation to C/C++ using the OpenCV library. One of the biggest difficulty was in handling map projections (how do we represent a point on the planet as a point in an image?). After considerable struggle, I managed to get the mapx library to perform vector projection of the buoy positions. Raster projection was performed using the ASF convert tool, which converted the CEOS Level 1 satellite image and produced geotiff images under Polar Stereographic projection (the map projection used for this project). The meta-information from the geotiff images and the projected buoy positions was used to extract the image at the camp location.
To provide for interaction between the various modules, I used Python and Matab scripts. The GPS positions from the buoys were obtained as an email and Python was used to parse them and to project them into Polar Stereogrpahic Coordinate system. Python was also used to pull images from the ASF ftp site, to perform map projection of the images and compute motion. These processing was scheduled to run at specific times through out the day using Pycron, a cron substitute for Windows. Once the processing was completed, Matlab was used to draw the maps and to generate the HTML/Javascript web pages that could then be sent to the researchers
(The results can be seen at http://vims.cis.udel.edu/~mani/SEDNA)
The International Arctic Research Center (IARC) is another leading research institute, with the majority of the research concentrated on the Arctic Ocean. Most projects, like the APLIS 07, attempt to provide a better understanding of global climactic change.
The most surprising aspect of the mushing is the silence once the sled is in motion. Despite the barks and yelps while in the dog yard, sleddogs switch off into complete silence once they are given the "go". So when I was on the sled, the only sound I could hear was the movement of the sled and nothing else.
Most sleddogs can typically pull up to 250 pounds and they are extremely efficient in conserving energy, which is why they are absolutely quiet when they are "at work". These amazing animals can actually work themselves to death and it is actually upto the owner to recognize this and give them a break...
Due to the arid climate and the presence of permafrost, many people live in “dry cabins”, with no hot water supply coming into the house. With an 8-month long harsh winter, setting up and maintaining hot water conduits is more expensive than getting hot water into the houses. So essentially, most buildings around the UAF campus have restrooms with attached showers for people to use. This was something that I first noticed and without knowing about dry cabins, I thought it was for people who got stuck in their offices under heavy snows accumulation. It was only later that I realized that it was not snow but the absence of hot water around town that made showers in offices a requirement.
The first thing that we did was to get a set of ear mufflers (sound of firing can be pretty loud, especially in an enclosed firing range) and goggles (to stop the splinters that might fly out after the shot is fired) before entering the firing range. We luckily had the entire range to ourselves, a group of 8 members who would be packing up our Arctic Gear in a week’s time. Most of them had prior experience in Polar expeditions except me, of course.
It started off with dry runs where we had to hold the shot gun, adjust our posture and take fake shots at a poster of a big grizzly bear with the heart and lung marked out. For the actual firing, Joe moved the target all the way to very end of the firing range (about 50 feet away). We were asked to load 3 cartridges and once we were ready, he started moving the target forward towards us. The requirement was to fire 3 shots by the time the target was within 10 feet away. The first shot, that I took, was like a tuning machine struck and held inside my brain, with a massive recoil. With each shot being fired, my body posture (should be bent forward) was out, the gun pointed somewhere along the direction of the target and that stupid sound kept echoing in my brain. This was despite having used an ear muffler!!! I don’t think I want to know how it would be without it.
Fairbanks was actually the home to the 2007 world ice sculpture championship, which was held at the 
