James English, Megan Picken, David Warnes and Harry Williams

• BSc (Hons) Geography/ BSc (Hons) Physical Geography
• Newcastle University Russia Expeditions 2019: Reconstructing environmental conditions in the Sayan Mountains, Siberia, Russia.

The purpose of the expedition was to travel to a remote fieldsite in the Sayan Mountains, Russia, to extract cores for environmental reconstruction using chironomids (non-biting midges), diatoms (single celled algae) and spheroidal carbonaceous particles (SCPs). Chironomids will be used for palaeotemperature reconstruction, diatoms will be used to quantify ecological change in the study lake and SCPs to assess the extent of anthropogenic pollution.

Travel to the fieldsite took three days and included the use of a minibus, off-road Ural Car and a hike accompanied by Russian counterparts from the Vinogradov Institute of Geochemistry and local guides and horses to assist in equipment transport. Once at the fieldsite, the team wild camped, hiking to and from the study lakes each day. Two inflatable rubber boats were used to access the lakes and long and short cores were extracted from two lakes – Kascadnoe-1 and Khikushka. A Wimbledon corer was used to extract short cores and a handheld percussion corer was used to extract long cores. Once the cores were returned to Irkutsk, the Kascadnoe-1 core was selected for subsampling in the Institute of Geochemistry laboratories and the team began the preparation of the subsamples necessary to produce microscope slides.

Funding sources: DIMA Project, Newcastle University Expeditions Committee, Sonia Stonehouse Expedition Fund, Royal Geographical Society, Gilchrist Educational Trust and Mount Everest Foundation

Project supervisor: Dr Maarten van Hardenbroek