Last Road Trip

by Porter Libby on 2019-06-12 with No Comments

Today we left from the archaeological site at Stod and moved to Seydisfjordur.

We were sad to leave such a welcoming, wholesome town, but excited for the next place/adventure.

We are only here for the night, but it is another nice break from our scientific work, which has been pretty constant in the last few days. Seydisfjordur is small, but it is a cool place to explore with lots of hiking trails and places to walk to.

Tomorrow we will head out to the end of the peninsula to Skalanes, where we will be working for the last week of scientific projects. Skalanes is, to some degree, the focus of our work here, so it has been nice to rest up before working hard for the next 7 days to finish our data collection and process samples.

Between Two Glaciers

by Porter Libby on 2019-06-08 with No Comments

The first thing we did today was pack and travel. We left our hostel in Vik early this morning, making a stop to collect groceries for the next few days, and set out north-east to Klaustur.

Klauster is a small town, right between Mýrdalsjökull, the glacier we worked at yesterday, and Vatnajökull, which is the second largest glacier in Europe. In Klauster we learned a lot about the history of the region, especially about the 1783 eruption of the volcanic fissure Lakagígar, a devastating natural disaster that we read about in the semester leading up to the trip.

After a short film about the eruption in a local visitor center, we went on a hike around the nearby cliffs, getting an excellent view of the ocean and the town below, as well as Systravatn, a beautiful lake at the top of the cliffs. At the end of the hike, we were about to see Kirkjugólf (The Church Floor), a formation called columnar basalt which forms when a lava flow cools under the right conditions.

Today was mostly a historical and cultural day, and a break from our scientific work, but it was really cool to see the places and landmarks we have studied in person.