We arrived at Skalanes late in the day yesterday and settled-in for the next week, it will be nice not to be moving every other day or so. There is a group of students from Scotland working here this summer so we’ll be sharing the chores with them and helping each other where our projects overlap. Skalanes is an experimental nature and heritage field center at the end of a peninsula on the East coast of Iceland. You can drive to within about 3km of it on a gravel road that heads east out of Seyðisfjörður, from there you hike the rest of the way, including crossing a couple of amazing rivers.

Skalanes sits near the shore of one of Iceland’s many fjords, and while we are here to work on a variety of projects it’s hard not to look-up now and again and relish the view.

We have two spaces to use here when we are not outside collecting samples, etc., our sleeping tent and our “office” where we do the indoor science work and programming.

In the picture above Gail, Deeksha, and Kristin are performing the NPK and pH tests on the soil samples we collected in the forefield of the Solheimajokull extent of the Myrdalsjokull glacier last Thursday. 

While we’re here we plan to work on a number of projects: improving the field/bench sampling functions of Field Day (our Android app), flying the UAVs over the archeological sites to capture close-in DNG images, performing small-scale LiDAR and magnetometer surveys on the archeological sites, testing the garden soil, measuring the flow rate of a river with an eye towards hydro power, and integrating all of the data we collect into QGIS.

Finally, there are two amazing dogs at Skalanes, Friar (the young pup) and Beartur (the old wise one).

As Deeksha said, doing science here is a literal dream come true.