Highlights of an amazing trip

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Today is the last day most of us are in Iceland for this trip. As I started this post, we were completing a tour of the Golden Circle after a few days in beautiful Reyjkavik. Now we are preparing for departure.

Our view of the volcano

I wanted to post some of the highlights of our trip. There’s a rough order to them, but don’t take the numbering too seriously – it’s been a great experience all-around. Without further ado:

  1. The volcano is truly incredible. It was not uncommon for people to spontaneously shout “Wow!” and “Oh my god!” as the lava burst up from the ground.
  2. We woke up every day for a few weeks with a view of a fjord.
  3. We did a glacier hike on Sólheimajökull, with two awesome guides.
  4. This was a historically successful round of data collection, both on the drone side and on the biology side. We’ll write and share a lot more about this in the next few months.
  5. We shared space with the group of phenomenal students from the University of Glasgow. We also collaborated with them on multiple occasions, learning a lot about different ways to study wildlife and local sites.
  6. THE FOOD – you probably don’t associate Iceland with food culture (I certainly didn’t), but our meals were delicious.
  7. The architecture and decorations are so distinctly Icelandic.
  8. Amazing photography and video – in high quality and high quantity.
  9. Walking along the boundary between the North American and European plates.
  10. Guided tour from our Skalanes hosts – who incidentally are awesome people – of a stretch of eastern Iceland.
Getting the rundown about glaciers at Solo

Some of my personal honorable mentions include:

  • Trail running at Skalanes is breathtaking.
  • Blue glacier ice is real neat.
  • The National Museum of Iceland is fascinating and well-done.
  • Rainbow roads in both Seyðisfjörður and Reykjavik highlight what a welcoming place this country is – also perfect reminders of Pride Month in the U.S.!
  • My first-in-my-lifetime tour of a beautiful country happened alongside people I admire who teach me things every single day. What more could I ask for?
A drone photo of the coast by the fjord

If you haven’t already, check out this interview with Charlie and Emmett, conducted by Cincinnati Public Radio.

Davit and Tamara flying

In addition to our success this year, we’ve also set up some great new opportunities for future years. With our long-time friend and collaborator Rannveig Þórhallsdóttir, we’ve added the cemetery in Seyðisfjörður to our list of sites to survey. We believe there may be historically-significant artifacts to be found there, and our drone work lends itself well to finding out.

The fjord at Skalanes

Finally, here’s the trip by the numbers:

  • 7 Earlhamites
  • 26 days
  • 183 GB of initial drone images and initial assemblies
  • 2 great hosts at Skalanes
  • 6 outstanding co-dwellers
  • 4 guides at 2 sites
  • 1 perfect dog
  • N angry terns
  • 1 amazing experience
Admiring the view

And that’s a wrap. Hope to see you again soon, Iceland!

The will of the drone

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In this blog post, I would like to explain further our work in Iceland and reflect on the experiences we are having regarding drone flying. There are two main archeological sites that we are surveying in this year’s expedition. One of them is close to the home we are staying in at Skálanes. It is both an archaeological site and a nature reserve/bird sanctuary. Our wonderful host Rundvig is the lead archeologist and is very interested in learning more about the place. We are hoping that our drone images will help her understand the area better. The second one is at Stöð, and it is an important archeological site for understanding the first settlement of Iceland.

DJI Phantom 4 Series drone that we are using to capture VLI imagery


This year, our mission is to take aerial images of as many areas of interest as possible that we were pointed to by our archeology friends. We are trying to take as many structured flights as possible, which means using external software to produce a flight plan. Flight plans are basic instructions for the drone, so it knows exactly what area it needs to cover without the pilot needing to fly it manually. We are using a new Android application for making flight plans called Pix4D Capture. This app lets us draw a rectangle in the world, and it sends the information of the flight plan based on that rectangle. We can choose the elevation of the flight plan, how fast the drone will fly, the overlap of the images, and the angle of the camera. We choose to use this app because our previous flight planning app was not compatible with drones other than the Phantom 3 series. We also wanted to use software that would be accessible to everyone.

Davit and Tamara flying a drone


Our experience of flying drones in Iceland has been full of ups and downs. The will of the drone is very unpredictable. Many things can upset it, such as high wind speed, not enough satellite coverage, or maybe an app running in the background on our phone. Because of this, we have learned always to expect the unexpected and to make the best that we got. The only issue is that bad weather and miss-behaving drone makes unfortunate drone pilots. However, over time we have become better at understanding the mysterious behaviors and what helps to make the drone act in the way that we want. Although, we will probably never fully understand the will of the drone.

Davit captured in NIR while trying to make a drone work in Stöð

Glasgow Students at the Skalanes Field Center

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At the Skalanes field center, we live with another team of researchers from the University of Glasgow. They are a group of 6 students who self-organized and funded the trip to Iceland, following the precedents of student researchers in previous years. Some projects they work on in Iceland include observing puffins, eider ducks, and foxes. The photos below include Avery, Abi, and Clara examining, recording, and photographing bone samples collected from various locations, including bird and fox feces. I will be interviewing some of the Glasgow students in the next couple of days to learn more about their work, so stay tuned! [Photos by Yujeong Lee]

DNA Extraction at Skálanes, Iceland

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On June 14th, Emmett Smith (he/they) and Faith Jacobs (she/her) successfully extracted DNA from soil samples. This lab is located at the natural and heritage science research center in Skálanes, Iceland. To learn more, read Emmett’s blog post here, and follow us on Instagram!

Scroll down to see the best photo of Emmett hugging his lab notebook 😚

[Photos by Yujeong Lee]

Flying cameras are good

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We recently chose not to use ground control points (GCP’s) as part of our surveying work. This is a departure from standards and conventions in the near-Earth surveying space. However, we believe we have made a sound decision that will support equally effective and more time and cost-effective research. In this post, I’ll explain that decision.

The short version: drone imagery and open-source assembly software (e,g. OpenDroneMap) are now so good that, for our purposes, GCP’s have no marginal benefit.

We have high-quality information about our trial area from an established authority – the Cultural Heritage Agency of Iceland. Their 2007 report of finds is the basis of our trial runs here at Skalanes. Surveying these predefined areas, we’ve now flown multiple flights, gathered images, and then run three assembles with OpenDroneMap.

Here’s a simple run over the area with no GCP’s:

Here’s a run over the area with GCP’s, adding no location metadata other than the craft’s built-in GPS coordinates (you’ll note that the ground footprint is slightly different, but the roundhouse in the middle is the key feature):

We also manually geocoded the GCP’s for one run.

In the end, we observed no meaningful difference between an assembly with GCP’s and an assembly without them. Adding the images as raster layers to a QGIS project confirmed this to our satisfaction:

With GCP:

Without GCP:

In summary, ground control points just don’t help us much compared to just taking a bunch of good photos and using high quality software to assemble them. They also cost us in portability: even four GCP’s are difficult to carry, occupying significant space in airport luggage and weighing down walks in the field. For scientists interested in doing work over a large area, potentially multiple times, that inconvenience is not a trivial cost.

The ODM assemblies are outstanding by themselves. We have good technology and build on the work of a lot of brilliant people. That frees us to be more nimble than we might have been before.

It wouldn’t be a post by me if it didn’t end with a cool picture. Here’s a drone image from a cliff near the house where we’re staying:

got milk?

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We woke up to snow-covered mountains surrounding the fjord. Iceland is beautiful because of its contrasts, and the starkness of white snow on black rock is no exception. After marveling at the view through the window, it was time to get down to business.

Me in the Skalanes Lab Area, working on DNA extraction. Photo by Yuejong Lee.

Yesterday, Faith Jackobs ’18 joined us from Houston, TX to work with us for a week while we’re camped out here at Skalanes. Faith has been on a previous EPIC Advantage Iceland trip, and joined us in 2019 to help with our ancient DNA project. Today we tackled DNA Extraction from Icelandic Soils, a protocol that has been in development since 2017. We have never had much success getting the DNA out of the soils of Iceland, because the type of soils we collect (brown andisols) are very good at binding DNA, and not very good at releasing it! I spent a lot of time in the fall of 2019 attempting to improve the DNA extraction protocol, and stumbled across a winning recipe. The secret? Skim Milk!

In 2005, Hoshino and Matsumoto published the following paper: “Skim Milk Drastically Improves the Efficacy of DNA Extraction from Andisol, a Volcanic Ash Soil.” In this paper, skim milk was added to a DNA extraction protocol during the first, important bead-beading step. This step is where the DNA is removed from the soil, and removed from any organisms living in the soil. It typically involves 10 or more minutes of intense vibrations in a small tube containing specialty beads and a buffer that protects the DNA from any enzymes/cellular debris present in the sample. I decided to incorporate the skim milk into our method. Back at EC, I meticulously added 10 mg of powdered skim milk to all of the bead-beating tubes in our kit to prepare them for the protocol.

The other piece of the puzzle that fell into place was creating enough of a vibration that the bead-beating step could properly do its job. Charlie and I created a device we’re calling the “Porta-lyzer” – see my previous post for a video. It seems that, in combination, this device and the addition of the skim milk worked like a charm. We’ve gotten the best DNA extraction results ever here at Skalanes.

Need proof?

2017201820192021
Average:4.227.252.766.83
StDev:2.6714.8242.1547.04
StErr:1.204.2812.1710.79
Table of DNA Extraction Performances for the past 4 trips to Iceland. Note that 2019 samples were processed at Earlham, with all the best lab equipment, not here at Skalanes.
The Porta-Lyzer! Photo by Yuejong Lee.

Needless to say, I’m thrilled. We even collected DNA from the elusive Solo era A – which has only been out of the ice for ~20 years, and is always an era that gives us lots of trouble.

Now it’s time for a celebratory adult beverage and a walk out to see the puffins. Cheers!

SCIENCE! Photo by Yuejong Lee.

To see a condensed video of Faith and I working on the extraction protocol, click here!

A reflection on awe

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The Greater Good Institute at Berkeley considers awe one of the keys to well-being:

Awe is the feeling we get in the presence of something vast that challenges our understanding of the world, like looking up at millions of stars in the night sky or marveling at the birth of a child. When people feel awe, they may use other words to describe the experience, such as wonder, amazement, surprise, or transcendence.

That’s the feeling I have at least once a day, every day, here in Iceland.

And it’s difficult to write a blog post about awe. Almost by definition, it’s an emotion that defies easy explanation. It has a mystique that risks being lost in the translation to plain language.

But if I can’t describe the feeling, I can describe why I’m having it.

Unique among my traveling companions, this is my first-ever trip out of my country of origin (🇺🇸) The sliver of gray in this image is the first thing I ever saw of a country not my own:

When we arrived, I got a passport stamp and exchanged currency – both brand new experiences. However mundane, they were novel for me and began waking me up to the new world I’d entered.

Our first few days were chilly, windy, and rainy. I was much happier about this than were my traveling companions. If our weather wasn’t pleasant, it was nonetheless exactly the immersive experience I was hoping for when I signed up for this trip.

In those first few days, I got to see this amazing waterfall:

I got to participate in collecting soil samples at a glacier —

Solo!

— and in howling wind on the side of a moraine:

The right side of the moraine was calm and quiet. The left was much less so.

For good measure, I saw floating blue ice for the first time:

All this was great, and to me they made this trip worth the months of planning and days of travel difficulties it took to get here.

Then we got to Skalanes, where I’m writing this post, and its landscapes exist on a whole other level. Here are ten views here, drawn almost at random from my photos:

This is a country that absolutely runs up the score on natural beauty.

I’ve taken hundreds of pictures here and they’re all amazing – but none does justice to actually being here. That combination is the signature of an awe-inspiring experience.

Awe puts us in touch with something above and beyond our daily worldly experience – call it the divine, the sublime, whatever speaks to you. It’s an experience you can reproduce if you try, but I believe it connects most deeply when it emerges organically from the world you enter. That’s what’s happened to me here.

It is remarkable that this is what we get to do for work, and I am so glad we have some more time to spend here in this awesome country.

Capturing Solar Eclipse in Skálanes

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Today June 10th was the day of the solar eclipse. The sky was so cloudy when we woke up around 8 a.m. that we thought we wouldn’t get to see the eclipse at all. Just when I had given up on the idea of photographing the sun, I heard Seth calling my name, “Yujeong, Yujeong, come see this outside!” And there it was, the sun slowly revealing itself as the clouds started clearing up around 9:30 a.m. Only the partial eclipse, not the annular eclipse, was visible in Iceland, and the maximum eclipse happened around 10:17 a.m. (although the sun was not visible during the time due to clouds).

Davit, Craig, Yujeong, and Seth watching & photographing the eclipse. Photo by Charlie Peck.
Camera gears, solar filters, eclipse SUNglasses. Photo by Yujeong Lee.

Seth came prepared with a set of eclipse sunglasses for the whole team to watch the eclipse. He also handed me two solar filters to cover my camera lens with. I am familiar with the solar filter that gives yellow-orange color to the sun, but it was my first time interacting with a white light solar filter. Seth also taught me today that I should set my camera focus to infinity to capture astronomical images. Although I am holding my camera in the photo above, I soon brought out a tripod for more stability. Here are some results of the shoot, and they are beautiful.

Solar eclipse as seen in Skálanes, Iceland. Photo by Yujeong Lee.
Solar eclipse as seen in Skálanes, Iceland. Photo by Yujeong Lee.

Besides the eclipse, Tamara and Davit had a mostly successful day flying the drone in two different locations (one in the roundhouse and another near the research center). Just before dinner, we tried going swimming on the beach, but we went to the wrong one where there were lots of birds poop ;- ) For dinner, Emmett and Beth (a student from Glasgow) made us pasta with fresh vegetables, not to mention the sourdough bread Emmett prepared & baked since yesterday! 🤯

Concentrated Tamara 🧃 Photo by Yujeong Lee.

Finally, in Skálanes

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Writing’s not really my forte, so I’ve been postponing writing a blogpost for quite a while now. I guess it’s the right time to introduce myself, the work I’m doing in Iceland, and some highlights from the past couple of days.

My name is Davit. I recently graduated from Earlham with a degree in Computer Science. I’ve been involved in Icelandic field science research since my junior year. Our plan to go to Iceland in 2020 failed miserably because of the global pandemic. We all waited patiently (or not) for one full year, and then a week ago we drove to Chicago, flew to New York and then to Keflavík. In reality, the trip was way more complicated and tiresome than I just made it sound; but arriving at Skálanes flushed away all the annoying details of getting here.

Me and Craig, working side by side. Photo by Yujeong Lee.

Wet, exhausted and frozen, we made the final 2 km hike on foot. As we walked, our path took us through a permanent tern colony, which is an important part of the preserve. At Skálanes we were greeted by our host – Olí who had already prepared a hot meal for us. He told us that the next day would be sunny – an Icelandic luxury that we had to take advantage of. Next morning, we got up early and started working on using our drones to survey areas of archeological interest.

The craft. Photo by Yujeong Lee.

A few details about how I’m involved in this research:

Most of the work that I did on campus involved refining the workflow of surveying to ensure that everything would go smoothly in Iceland. This included familiarizing myself with the drones and practicing flying them manually. I also built a web interface for the visualization of the near-infrared (NIR) images taken by the drones. I have been a sysadmin at Earlham for almost 3 years, so I was also helping in plumbing up different software and tools that the research depends on.

The last two days the clear weather has allowed us to fly the drones. We have tried to make the most out of it! After Charlie picked the first spot for us, Craig, Tamara and I went to the surveying site. We have been using a Phantom P4 drone with PixD4 software to make automated flights. By taking a good amount of photos from 50 meters of elevation we will be able to build 2D and 3D models of the terrain.

Waiting for the drone to finish the flight mission. Photo by Yujeong Lee.

Unfortunately, we had a bit of bad news too. Our only drone with NIR lenses is a bit jet lagged and is stubbornly refusing to calibrate its gimbal. Once it starts raining again (it won’t be long!) we will be forced to work inside. Then, we’ll have the chance to focus and solve the NIR issue. Meanwhile, we are using the ordinary lenses to harvest as much data as we can.

Today, we flew the drones at a spot where the terns are nesting. They’re beautiful birds, but they were not at all happy to see us doing science nearby. They made continual short ranged attacks by pecking us, and also engaged in long ranged bombing efforts as they dropped their biological weapons on our heads.

Drone in the sky, angry birds and poop on my jacket. Photo by Yujeong Lee.

Soil Sampling & Staying at a Cabin in Hofn

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After the very long day(?) of waiting in various airports, landing in Iceland, then immediately hiking for several hours to collect soil samples, I had almost forgotten what it means to feel tired, and our team lost track of time and day. And of course, Iceland’s never-setting sun wasn’t of much help. :- )

Remote shutter release after soil sampling at Sólheimajökull. Photo by Yujeong Lee.


Our first official temporary housing was at Höfn Cottages. The small cabin was equipped with a small kitchen/restroom area and a room tightly packed with bunk beds for four. The wooden beds were quite beautifully built into the cabin with the lower bunks wider than the top bunks. There was enough space for one person to move through in between the bunk beds but nothing more. The restroom had a toilet and a sink without hot water. The small kitchen area was packed with a small electric stovetop and a sink on the left and a round table with two chairs on the right. Laminated instructions and cabin rules on the wall informed us that 3 minutes of hot shower would cost 100 króna at the common shower facility. Tamara and I walked to the common shower late rainy evening and each successfully took 3 minute showers.

The cabin I stayed at along with 3 other people. Photo by Yujeong Lee.
Davit and his bubble. Photo by Yujeong Lee.


Charlie made us fabulous oatmeal for breakfast the next morning, and we were soon on our way to Kvíárjökull. Just like the first day of soil sampling, we split into 2 teams to go to different locations. Having photographed the team with Emmett, Seth, and Tamara already, I followed Charlie, Craig, and Davit this time. Walking on the endless mossy and dark soiled land, I thought I would encounter a battle in Narnia, then another moment I felt I was a character in a game of battle royale.

Emmett, Seth, and Tamara at a soil sampling site. Photo by Yujeong Lee


After collecting 2 sets of samples in the various locations Emmett had planned out for us, we finally reached the research center at Seyðisfjörður after 4 hours of driving!

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