Ready for the Arctic amidst the palm trees! Can you spot my balaclava?

Many people have gone above and beyond to make this phenomenal job possible, and the outpouring of support (especially during the last few days) has been extremely gratifying! Special thanks to Rob Dunbar, Julie Kennedy, Thomas Hayden, and the Earth Systems Program; Kevin Arrigo, Gert van Dijken, and Lynsey Hays in the Environmental Earth Systems Science Department; Helen Doyle, Michael Sean Heflin, and Max Borella in the School of Earth Sciences; Doug Osheroff and Marcia Keating in the Physics Department; Louis Bergeron and Jack Hubbard at the Stanford News Service; Jennifer Foerster in the Creative Writing Program; Stephen Cole at NASA; and Carlee Brown my roommate. My deepest gratitude goes to my parents, for raising me to be zany enough to jump at the opportunity to spend six weeks on an icebreaker in the Arctic!

Hence I’m thrilled to depart for Alaska again, this time for a NASA-sponsored Arctic Ocean scientific research cruise to investigate the impacts of climate change upon the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas! My professor Kevin Arrigo, chief scientist, hired me as a student journalist to document the trip through writing, photography, and video. The six-week position is truly my dream job and I feel very fortunate. My work will appear on the official ICESCAPE 2010 blog and you can also follow the voyage on Twitter.

We’ll be living aboard a four-hundred-foot Coast Guard icebreaker that leaves Dutch Harbor on June 15 and steams back into Seward on July 21, after which I’ll spend some time at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center where I volunteered last summer, and then a few days in the temperate Hoh Rainforest on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula with my cousin Maggie Smith. I’ll touch down at Logan Airport on August 2 and absolutely cannot wait for a full month with my family waking up to the sounds of halyards clattering on Restless! Finally, I’ll return to Stanford in early September for an intensive nature drawing seminar before school starts.

I’m very excited for a summer of creativity, wilderness, and sea legs!