Entrenched in Alaska Part 1: Digging the trenches

Since my Masters thesis has very little field research of its own, I've spent most of the past 2.5 weeks being 'Britta's Bitch'; a field assistant to our lab's biggest personality.

In the lab Britta is an irritating figure, impossibly self-righteous and demanding of attention. But in the field she's a brighter, freer being, reveling in the confession that this is what she's in the business for. While my body is sluggish, stumbling across the dirt bluffs, Britta skips and slides up the hills, digging trenches and discovering tephra as she goes.

Tephra is what we're here for. Tephra, for our purposes is volcanic ash, and we're searching for it in the loess (wind-blown sediment) bluffs of 'Beringia'; the area of North America and Russia that wasn't covered by ice during the last Ice Age. The area was too dry for ice to form, but grasslands thrived, supporting a population of megafauna such as the wooly mammoth, steppe bison and sabre-tooth tiger, to name a few. What's volcanic ash got to do with all this? Well, fortunately, ashes tend to have unique chemistries, so that you can match up a tephra found in one location with another found elsewhere. If you can find a way to put a date on that tephra in one place, then you also know how old it is in every other location, in turn helping to date any sediment the tephra lies within. This is an invaluable resource when trying to piece together the environmental history of an area: any proxies of climate are useless if you cannot put them in context.

'Beringia' was a phrase I'd never even heard of before I came to Canada. That's the thing about science, there are so many areas, so many disciplines, techniques, specialities, and they're always expanding. Britta exemplifies a scientist by having the patience and constant interest to keep up with all these advancements and to be excited by them, trying out anything that might help her reach her goal.

In fact, her only flaw seems to be keeping that goal in mind! Most postgraduate projects change and evolve, but Britta seems to be in danger of not answering any of her original questions, or else working on the same problem for her entire academic life (she's already been working on the issue for 7 years, through a Masters and now a PhD). However, she seems happy with this, and that's when I realised another fundamental reason I want to be in journalism and not research: Britta's in it for the race, and I'm in it for the finish line. I revel in conclusions and a job completed. Deadlines suit me. Still, I know that the science itself is never finished when I close a piece, and that half the joy would be revisiting subjects in the future to see what marvellous advances have been made in the mean time.

Those changes may seem marvellous from that perspective, but science is really a long and arduous process, and for now digging trenches is my task. But at least they get dug, and mighty proud I am of them too!

Trench sculpted by Britta, dirt-shovelled by me