natursyn.dk

After spending nearly a month in Santa Cruz I got an opportunity to see one of California’s most beautiful places when my friends Birthe & Carsten came by to visit me. They began their 4 months travel through Northwestern USA in July from Alaska and made it all the way to Idaho on bicycles. To travel longer distances they then changed their mean of transportation to car. As anybody else visiting Yosimete I was taken by the size of the giant sequoias that can reach a height of 80 m and have a volume up to 1500 sq. m (that is just the trunk). Yosemite valley was also very impressive and beautiful. See more pictures from our 3 days trip here: http://picasaweb.google.com/natursyn/Yosemite

I am no longer going to report on this blog from Alaska. Two days ago I flew down to University of California in Santa Cruz to work in the Ocean Sciences lab for my remaining stay in the US on my Carlsberg fellowship. I’ll be working on a new method to analyze stable isotopes in amino acids that potentially can simplify the rather meticulous method that I’m using now. My girlfriend Yiming has left Alaska as well but for a postdoc position in Kiel, Germany. Once I’m done here in the US I’ll also be heading to Kiel although I’m not quite sure yet what my next project is going to be.

Alaska will forever have a big place in my heart. The beauty is stunning and you can still find undisturbed places of wilderness. But I pray that the offshore drilling that is now in the pipeline will never happen. An oil spill out in the frozen Arctic sea could wreck havoc on the fragile ecosystem for centuries to come.

Below are some pictures from a visit two weeks ago in Denali National Park.