Today we drove to the Qutab Minar in Delhi, a 12th-century monument from India’s Muslim past.  The tower part of it (the Minar) is about 240 feet high and is made of quartzite and marble.  The grounds are full of beautiful ruins – arches, walls and gates with delicately carved stone ornamentation.

Also there is a mysterious Iron Pillar that dates from a much earlier time than the Minar.  It may be from the 12th century BC, which would make it over 3000 years old.  It has not rusted in all that time because it is so pure; it’s 99.7% iron.  Iron as pure as that doesn’t rust easily, not even in India’s warm and humid climate.  It’s not obvious how ancient people forged such pure iron and as a result all kinds of sensational and improbable theories have been proposed about it.

We got to this place by driving – no metro today.  So, it took a while.

Tomorrow we leave Delhi and go to the Himalayas to do some science.

Annalea Beattie (an Australian teacher) and I had some time to kill so we took the airport express metro into downtown New Delhi and walked to the India Gate before returning.

It’s actually kind of a challenge to walk around in New Delhi, although there are rewards too.  The challenges include:  It’s hot and sunny, sidewalks are often broken up, obstructed or nonexistent, and there’s a lot of fast traffic coming at you from the “wrong” direction, if you’re American.  But the biggest challenge is that lots of people will come up to you and involve themselves in what you’re doing.  They will be very persistent, and not take “no” for an answer.  They will want to know where you’re going, where you’re from, how long you have been in town, how long you intend to stay.  They may walk with you for some distance to show you the way.  They may argue that your plan isn’t a good one, that the place you want to go to is closed, or in the wrong direction, or that it’s too far.  Some want to drive you in their taxis, jitneys or rickshaws.  Some want to bring you to a shop.  Some are just nice middle class Indians who honestly want to help and have no desire to take money from you, but it’s not always easy to tell at first.  But nobody, absolutely nobody, approves of two westerners walking somewhere in New Delhi.  You’re supposed to get driven.

But, outside the tourist areas with shops the pressure on you eases a bit.  We went to the India Gate, which is India’s equivalent of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris or the the Monumento de la Revolucion in Mexico.  It’s very impressive, and people were setting up for the Independence Day festivities next week.  Families were there, and couples were meeting in the park.

The real refuge from heat and people is, surprisingly, the metro.  It’s air conditioned, efficient, inexpensive, and easy to learn how to use.  The airport express line that we mostly took is totally clean and modern and fast and very lightly used, and even the regular line was at least as nice as the New York City or Boston subways, or BART, at least on this Sunday.

So I got on a plane in San Francisco on the morning of August 5th and a long time later I landed in India on the afternoon of August 6th – the next day.  We never crossed the International Date Line and the bright sun was shining during the entire trip.  So there was never any night between August 5th and August 6th.  How is this possible?

Answer- we flew above the Arctic Circle on  a Great Circle Route.  During the hours that should have been “night”, and would have been night in a different season, the sun was above the horizon shining into our eyes across the top of the world.  Plus, eleven and a half hours simply disappeared due to the time zone difference.  Actually, those hours just never existed at all.

What is a great circle route, you may ask?  Sometimes the most direct way to go from west to east (and back again) is to go north, and then south.  On a rectangular map of the world this makes no sense but the Earth is really a sphere.  Take a piece of string and hold it over a globe, placing one end at San Francisco and one end at New Delhi.  You will see that if you stretch it tight it passes over Canada, Greenland, Norway and Russia.  Look down on the globe from the north pole and it will be obvious why.

Air travel is romantic, no matter how small the seats are or how long the lines you wait in.  Here I am flying halfway around the world in less than a day!  Whoever thought our planet is big?  You can see the whole thing from the air.  I saw Mount Shasta, the Columbia River, the Canadian Rockies (Jasper National Park was stunningly beautiful; I need to go there!), clouds in the arctic, salt flats in Kazakhstan, green patchworks of fields and villages on the Indian plain.

I am going to India; specifically Ladakh which is high up in the Himalayas.  I’ll be there to participate in the NASA Spaceward Bound India 2016 expedition:  http://spacewardbound.astrobiologyindia.in/

Astrobiologists study life in extreme environments here on earth, like hot springs, deserts and mountaintops.  I’ll be going with some of them.  I will have to miss the first four days of school!  To my new students:  I am very sorry.  I don’t usually do this.  See you very soon.

What to bring?

One set of artificial hypoliths to deploy for Drake High’s worldwide hypolith project
GPS (Global Positioning System) receiver with extra batteries
blood oxygen meter with extra batteries
Li-Cor Quantum Radiometer/Photometer
Digital camera with charger
Laptop computer with power cord
plug adapter for Indian electrical sockets
data stick with files, presentations
binoculars, field notebook + pencils
Scale model of solar system to use on school visits
business cards
Copy of Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard
water purification tablets and hand sanitizer
PASSPORT with Indian Visa, watch, wallet, money, house key
Lots of paperwork!
Sun hat, bandana hankerchrief, sunglesses, sunscreen
day pack and water bottle
hiking boots and socks
thermal underwear, wool hat, rain gear
clothes and bath kit.

Just because our cold frame project is finished doesn’t mean we can’t go to the White Mountains.  We love it up here at 13,000 feet.

Last year we noticed that the place is full of old stone shepherd’s huts.  We assumed these were made by Basque people between 1850 and 1950.  This year we came back to survey, and boy we have just scratched the surface.  Stone structures are absolutely everywhere.  Not all of them look the same.  Besides proper huts, there are stone walls, circles, crescents, horseshoes, doughnuts, etc.  Some of them are really too small or too full of sharp rocks to lie down in comfortably.

Some are probably prehistoric hunting blinds.  There are lots of deer and bighorn sheep up here, and lots of obsidian arrowheads.  To kill an animal with a bow and arrow means you have to get close, and there is no natural cover here.  But you can hide behind a low stone wall or circle.

There are other structures that look more like hut circles (tent pads, basically), windbreaks, or food caches.  We made detailed measurements and generated 22 pages of data.  We know of dozens more structures that we haven’t been to yet.

What does a “proper” shepherd’s hut look like?   It has a fireplace on the south side with a chimney.  It faces north or east.  Stones with naturally flat faces are stacked neatly with the faces in a plane to make one big face.  It has low “spurs” flanking the doorway.  It does not have to have a roof.  Around it are artifacts like metal cans, horseshoes, cut wood, shoe leather, or pieces of glass.  The name “A. Giraud” was found on two of them.

We only observed and photographed them.  We moved nothing and left all artifacts in place.

At one o’clock this morning as we were patrolling I spotted a dark patch at the edge of the water.  Sure enough, it was an emerging Olive Ridley Sea Turtle. We  backed off and sat down at a distance to wait for her to finish emerging.  She was about three feet long from nose to tail and her domed shell was maybe 15″ high.

Once she had crawled up to the edge of the beach where the vegetation begins, we circled around and sneaked up behind her.  She totally ignored us.  She was digging a deep hole underneath her rear end with her hind flippers.  You wouldn’t think that a sea turtle’s hind flippers would be particularly dexterous, but she would bend her flippers into an “L” shape, reach down deep, and carefully lift out a bit of sand using her left and right flippers alternately.  The three of us lay on the sand right behind her and watched using the red light of our headlamps.

Then she stopped digging and started to lay eggs.  Sean handed me a counter, which is a little mechanical device with a button and a display for tallying eggs.  Lying on the ground just behind her, I peeked underneath her and every time an egg popped out I added it to the count.  This wasn’t easy because often they would come out two at a time.  She laid 78 eggs.  They looked like wet, glossy white ping-pong balls; perfectly round.  While I counted Sean and Dean went forward to measure her shell and give her a flipper tag, since she didn’t have one yet.  All this is called “working a turtle” and it’s best done in a team of three.

When the eggs stopped coming, she backfilled the hole with sand, all using her hind flippers.  Then she began her “dance”:  she kind of stamped on the sand, left foot, right foot, left foot, etc., all the while shimmying back and forth and swaying her shell.  I guess she does this to pack down the sand.  We left.

I have a new appreciation for turtles!  I’m going to have a special feeling about them the rest of my life.

This is my last blog form Costa Rica.  I sure am grateful to the Earthwatch Institute for giving me this opportunity.

The Hatchery is a place where we move turtle nests to if they’ve laid their eggs in a bad spot.  It is a fenced-in patch of sand with some equipment.

Volunteers guard the hatchery all night, every night.  I’ve done a couple of shifts.  It’s pleasant, low-pressure work.  You sit in the dark in the middle of the hatchery with a companion and a mosquito coil for company.  The sky is really black and the Milky Way is really bright.  There is usually a cool breeze.  I spend a lot of my time on my back, studying the stars through my binoculars.  Orion, the Pleiades, and Jupiter are especially good viewing.  The two-way radio is on so you can hear the patrols on the beach telling each other  where they are and if there are any turtles.  Since the hatchery is the end point for two of the beach patrols, volunteers on patrol drop by about once an hour for a visit.  Every half hour you check the nests to see if any baby turtles have crawled out of the sand, but this rarely happens.  Once in a while you scan the fence line with your flashlight for raccoons.  After five or six hours somebody comes to relieve you.

Yesterday we were in the hatchery to excavate a nest that never hatched.  This happens sometimes; nobody knows exactly why.  We dig up all the eggs (they are buried arms-length deep) and open them up to see how far they developed.  For these ones, they didn’t get very far.  Maybe they were too hot, or too dry, or the turtle just wasn’t very fertile.  There are some things we still don’t understand about turtle reproduction.  We have a lot of successes at the Hatchery, though.

We went up the estuary of the Parque National Marino las Baulas de Guanacaste (the national park we work at) in a small boat to see what’s there.  An estuary is a place where fresh river water meets salt water from the ocean.  The resulting partly-salt water is called brackish.

This estuary is lined with mangroves.  Mangroves are small trees that can grow with their roots in salt water.  They are found all over the world on tropical coastlines.  Their roots form big tangles in the shallow water which provides excellent cover for birds, small fish, and all kinds of wildlife.

This estuary has crocodiles, howler monkeys, parrots and all kinds of wadding birds.

There are seven species of sea turtles:  Green Turtles, Hawksbills, Olive Ridleys, Kemp’s Ridleys, Loggerheads, Flatbacks, and Leatherbacks.  Leatherback turtles are the heaviest reptiles in the world, and the most widely distributed.  They are found all over the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans from the tropics to the polar seas north of Scandinavia.  They are not very closely related to other sea turtles.  They lack hard shells, but have a stiff rubbery skin with seven knobby ridges running fore and aft.  They are somewhere between warm blooded and cold blooded:  they have body temperatures that are typically higher than their surroundings, but their body temperatures are not constant.  They eat jellyfish, which are very low in nutrients.  So they eat a lot:  up to 200 pounds of jellyfish per turtle, per day.  Jellyfish, in turn, eat commercially important fish so leatherbacks are important ecologically and even economically.  Tourists also pay to see them when they come ashore.

Three of the seven species lay their eggs here on Playa Grande, our beach, but this project is really all about the Leatherbacks.  In the late 20^th century over a thousand leatherbacks nested here every year.  It was the biggest leatherback nesting beach in the world, but almost all the eggs were being taken by organized egg harvesters.   So far this season only twenty leatherbacks have shown up.  They’ve had two decades of protection but it probably takes longer than two decades for a female leatherback turtle to reach sexual maturity, so all those baby turtles that were saved aren’t laying yet.  (Former egg poachers are now on board as scientific collaborators, which is actually a common story in conservation biology.)

Part of the research going on here has to do with the optimal conditions for their nests.  Nests can get too hot or too dry for the eggs to survive.  Oxygen, humidity and bacteria in the sand all play a role in determining whether eggs will hatch or not.  Because of bacteria, the scientists here clean all of the sand out of the hatchery annually to a depth of one meter and replace it with fresh sand.  This is a ridiculous amount of work because the hatchery is as big as a small house lot.  Hotter temperatures result in a higher ratio of females to males; lower temperatures have the opposite effect.  Part of the research is just basic counting:  number of nests, number of turtles, sizes of turtles, number of eggs, number of seasons per turtle, etc.

Once a turtle has hatched it is supposed to crawl down to the water’s edge, but bright lights from houses or towns will attract it and trick it into going in the wrong direction.  Once it is in the water, it faces other threats:  getting caught in a fishing net, or eating plastic.  Ninety percent of leatherback turtles have pieces of plastic in their stomachs.  A plastic bag floating in the water looks just like a jellyfish.  Maybe we should ban disposable plastic.  We have plenty of other good reasons to do that.

I can’t photograph the adult leatherbacks on the beach because it is dark and I can’t use a flash.  But they are BIG!!  Like boats.  The web site of the Leatherback Trust has some good pictures.  http://www.leatherback.org/

There’s a lot of wildlife here.  Costa Rica has over 400 species of reptiles and amphibians.  In our backyard there’s a big iguana who spends his days sunning himself on his favorite corner of the shed roof.  If you get too close he becomes agitated and does push-ups. 

I asked the biologists his name and they said he didn’t have one!  That had to change.  We settled on Cteni Tom, pronounced “Teeny Tom.”  (The C is silent.)  That’s because he is a Spinytail Iguana, Ctenosaura similis.  They are plant eaters, active by day. 

Tom is a handsome adult with a big dorsal crest – the spikes along his back.  He is about a foot and a half long.  A few other iguanas share his space, but not for long.  The special corner is his.