| Summary: | Jaakko Putkonen takes the classroom to Antarctica in search of climate clues for Earth, beyond In an era soaked in a digital deluge where online is the place to be, Jaakko Putkonen and his student teams blaze — or let's say freeze — a totally different path. This University of North Dakota geomorphologist, a native of Finland, spends most of his field time in Antarctica and other frigid remote places. Most recently, Putkonen took himself and a team of UND graduate and undergraduate students to a remote interior desert — an ice-free valley — along the largest mountain range in Antarctica. They were chasing clues to how and why landscapes change. They also retrieved vital "data loggers" placed in that Antarctic desert by Putkonen and another student team a year earlier. "We wanted to collect data and more samples and to go to places this time that we couldn't get the last time we were there (in December 2010 to January 2011)," said Putkonen. He's conducted research in several of the remotest, highest and coldest locations in the world, including Antarctica, Greenland, Spitsbergen, Lapland, and in the Himalaya Mountains. "It's a physically punishing trip because you're working 2,500 meters above sea level in a truly rough landscape. And when I say rough, I mean boulders on top of boulders. After most days, we were mentally exhausted just because we had to plan every step, jumping from boulder to boulder, as falling down is not really an option in a location where the nearest medical help is 1,000 miles and several days away." The data loggers and sensors were placed at various locations in the desert to gather a year's worth of information. "All that equipment had to go through an Antarctic winter, which can be truly brutal," Putkonen said. "We set all the sensors and data loggers up on plumbing-grade zinc pipe anchored with boulders." Rocks of ages Putkonen and one of his Ph.D. students, Theodore Bibby, are extracting scientifically usable information from the piles of data and samples they gathered. Part of that ...
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