3 minutes, 13 seconds

Dr. Chris Fastie says:

(Cutting sounds) There are lots of low tundra shrubs... and the top 10-20 cm is pure organic with lots of wiry roots. And once you cut through that rooted organic mat everything beneath that is pure mineral soil and rocks. And right here (cutting sounds) about 20-30 cm deep, there's a big rock. So we've cut all the way down to that. And now I'm gonna cut it off at the bottom (cutting sounds). And lift out the block. So this block of soil. Probably took a couple hundred to several hundred years to develop. These shrubs have been growing every year, dying, and their dead remains have been decomposing very slowly in these cold, wet alpine sites. The OM accumulates, so this top 15 cm of this soil monolith probably represents 100s of years of the accumulation of dead plant material. We hope that deeper in the soil their might be 100 to 200 to 300 year old plants, seeds, fruits, stems and leaves that we can identify. And we also hope that there will be a record of fires. If this tundra burned in the past several hundred years, charcoal would have been created, and charcoal lasts a long time. So this might record past fires and tell when that fire was.