Well – I skipped entire June… it was too hot and muggy to blogJ. Temps almost daily breaching 90 degrees, with humidity sky-high… and no a/c in the apartmentL But, it was a busy June. Submitted paper “TWO DECADES OF TRENDS IN GROUND WATER CHEMICAL COMPOSITION IN THE GREAT VASYUGAN MIRE, WESTERN SIBERIA, RUSSIA” to EES; sent an abstract “IS CLIMATE CHANGE AFFECTING GROUND WATER CHEMISTRY IN THE LARGEST BOREAL WETLAND?” to the Vancouver GSA Meeting. And wrote in Russian and submitted to a Russian journal an article “HOW TO WRITE AN ARTICLE IN EARTH SCIENCES FOR PUBLICATION IN AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL.” This may be not very PC, but that last one is an off-shoot of reading too many poorly prepared manuscripts, literally translated from Russian. Well – I can understand poor translation (mostly using Google-translate – ugh!), but I got tired of reading chaotic papers lacking any reasonable structure. Results mixed in introduction, discussion mixed with results, methods mingling with study site description… just a big pot of random tidbits of information… Oh – yes, there are good papers of Russian scientists published in international journals, but they are almost always co-authored with an English-speaking colleague, more or less familiar with the accepted structure of a scientific article.
Well – my term here is running out. Come end of July I’ll be on my way back home at the end of gratifying nine month here. Two semesters of classes helped to refresh my half-dormant Russian and the research with my colleagues on the Great Vasyugan Mire was great and productive. I am still working on a large data base on the geothermal fluids of Kamchatka and Kurile Islands volcanoes.