Well, this is the last week of fog collection! We'll be leaving the island next Wednesday if all goes as planned, and might stop sampling as soon as Sunday. The fog has been less frequent this week, but tonight has been an exception! I came to the station around 2:30 am, after starting the smaller collector in Jinchon. I had already missed about an hour of high LWC (that's liquid water content; 80-90 mg/m^3) fog when I arrived, but captured another two hours of liquid with the size fractionated collector. I think there's enough sample there for me to run a good oxidation reaction with when I get back to CSU, which is the goal! There's definitely plenty to use for chemical analyses from both the small and large droplets collected. The fog parted briefly while I saw the beginning of dawn light up some beautiful valley fog banks surrounding the station, and then started up again --- not as high LWC this time (50-60 mg/m^3), but it'll do! I'll explain this picture a little ways down the page, but I wanted start off this post right with this gorgeous image of a lotus flower now that they're in full bloom here on Baengnyeong!
This week I returned unexpectedly to HUFS (the university where my host advisor is a professor) because of the weather conditions at the island, which were unfavorable for fog events. Typhoon Neoguri and monsoon season were both only weakly felt in the northern part of the Korean peninsula, but it still impacted the general weather pattern up until this past Sunday. I spent a little time making a test calibration curve (running known concentrations of known chemicals to figure out what the signal-to-chemical amount ratio is) on the total organic carbon instrument available at HUFS, thanks to the lab of Dr. Guyoung Kang and the help of the new graduate student in our lab, Taehyun. I got the opportunity to spread out my things in my nice, big, clean dorm room (yay!) and worked from my room using the very fast internet I have for several days. Look at this great window!! I get to use this dorm room again when I get back to HUFS in about another week.
Also, this bathroom is really spacious, the mirrors are big and clean, and I get hot water all the time in the shower!
The campus is now in full summer mode: the trees and shrubs are blooming, and there are bugs and birds everywhere. These beautiful flowering vines cover the hillsides (they might even be an invasive, there's so much of them) and their flowers smell great! Sort of a fruity scent. The flowers look almost like a locust stalk, and I was looking around to make sure I wasn't misidentifying which plant they belonged to. They're multicolored as you can see --purpleish and white. I think I've identified them as a kudzu... does anyone have any thoughts on this?
There are also several of these flowering trees, which you see grown in people's yards in the states. They look a lot like a touch fern or a mimosa plant, with little pink pom poms as flowers. It's a nice contrast to the very green underbrush in these hills.
I made two attempts at trail running in the hills around the HUFS campus, since I've been told several times that there are some really great trails... this is an example of one of them. While it looks like a nice, not-too-maintained trail as in the states, there are spider webs and bugs EVERYWHERE. It might just be the season, but I emerged the first trail I ran flailing and spitting to eliminate all the bug-related items in my face.
This one was a bit better, but apparently I was unaware of something that bit/stung me, leaving some big bumps on my knee. I have an image, but I've decided not to include it. Not appealing.
After a few days of down time, I traveled back to the island for our final fog collecting period. I arrived on Sunday evening and went for a nice run along the coast just north of Jinchon, then decided to explore the vegetarian dinner and lunch options available at convenience stores some more (I'd tried this once before with Jungmin, but with limited success ---I don't recommend the cold pumpkin potato salad). I found two cup-of-noodles-esque meals that looked mostly meat free. These were actually pretty good: one was a Japanese mushroom flavor, and the other was macaroni and cheese. They may have been tastier had I taken the time to translate the cooking directions. So I'm back at the "Motel Paradaiseu" for a while, which is friendly and convenient.
The most exciting news this week has been the fog event that I've sampled tonight: you can see in this screen shot that the LWC has been quite high.
Unfortunately, the other sampler I had running overnight, which is a passive sampler that collects carbonyls, did not withstand the amount of water that it collected along with the gases I was hoping to collect. In theory, this would have given me an idea of some of the concentrations of precursors for aqueous secondary organic aerosol (aqSOA; the products of the reactions that I'm hoping to observe within these fog water samples), but it looks like the setup that we've figured out just isn't going to allow us to make those measurements --at least not during fog events. I've just gotten an idea from writing this down that we might be able to at least measure during the daytime (dry time) if we use a higher flow rate, and dry out the poor rotameter from this morning's fog... It's worth a try!
I imagine that this island is very dynamic through the seasons: it snows here in the winter, and there is so much agriculture that I'm sure it gets pretty brown while it's cold. Even just between foggy or hazy days and those when it's nice and sunny out, there's a dramatic change in the look of this little town, Jinchon.
Running around the area has given me a little better perspective on the people and their daily lives, as well as on the rest of the island outside of the two places that I've been for work (Jinchon and the station). While there are clean, well-kept yards and nice buildings in Jinchon, there are also people who drink water from the storm drains and many animals I've seen that look very unhealthy. Much of the food served in restaurants is cleaned the street with a hose, or cooked at home. This differs from the states, and although I'm sure it's just as clean as your average Denny's kitchen, it was difficult for me to accept at first. I think these practices extend to most smaller towns in Korea --I've seen signs of this in Yongin as well, and have been warned that food from the town has been bad before (I've been lucky so far!).
And OH the bugs. There are little critters everywhere in the lab, since the door to the front of the building is frequently open to ventilate it. I've looked a bit at websites to find out whether any of them are dangerous, but have only read about a few that were imported from other parts of the world to watch out for. This guy sort of looks like an armored, six-legged mole... Most of the bugs have been about this size --pretty big compared to what I'm used to!
I thought that I'd seen the biggest spider on the island when I showed you a picture before... but these guys are everywhere! On my run near the northern coast of the island, they were every 5-10 feet off the side of the road. This one is outside the Motel Paradise, and has been eating dragonflies and other bigger bugs recently. It's a monster!!
Now on to the lilies. I've stopped again at this little place before with the whole lab group, then with just Jungmin, but the flowers weren't in bloom before. They're so beautiful now! I had to turn around on my way home one day this week because I couldn't resist the idea of taking some photos while they were at their peak (also because this little venue has patbingsu --shaved ice with sweets on top ---yum!). There are white, off-white, white and pink, bright pink, brighter pink.... all kinds of different ponds full of these lotus flowers.
And along the walkways between the flowers, there are frogs!
Here's the venue from the road. It's a very odd place, as I think I mentioned in an earlier post --every time I go there, I hear the song "I need a hero" from Shrek/the 80s, along with other assorted American music from that era. There are a couple pets around, which I enjoy spending a little time with. It also looks like there might be weddings/concerts/parties here at other times during the year...? For anyone who happens to come to this island in the future, I certainly recommend a visit to this odd little place in the middle of nowhere. Maybe even a stay at their guesthouses.
I ran on Wednesday to this beach at the SE part of the island. It's part of the diatomaceous earth beach, and looks quite similar to the Oregon Coast beaches --home!
And complete with beach treasures --I think I've seen these sorts of floats snatched up in Oregon as good beachcomber finds, but they're everywhere here! There are also all kinds of really nice, big shells that are all over the beaches in some parts, I think from shellfish harvesting.
The fog here really is quite beautiful - it obscures hilltops and changes the landscape suddenly. It generally pours in during the evening, coming from the ocean, which is several directions in Jinchon. The fog doesn't usually get thick enough to sample for quite some time after that, if at all, but for me, as a fog collector, it warns me that I should be ready at any moment to go set up the bottles to gather fog water. What an odd job --but it's fun!
Here are some images from this morning's fog event at the station, as the sun was just starting to show up. There are some very distinct fog banks apparent in the hills and over the ocean, which is in the left of this image.
And another shot of the sf-CASCC in action! It will be on to its third set of samples this morning in just a few minutes...
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