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.

Today was our first day “in the field”. We started with a short visit to the Hellisheidi geothermal power station located just outside of Reykjavik. This is the largest combined power and heat geothermal plant in Iceland and the second largest in the world, 99% of the buildings in Reykjavik are heated by district hot water loop that originates here. The tremendous amount of heat stored in the ground under Iceland makes the energy economy very different here, all forms of fossil fuel are shipped here via barge making them very expensive. On the other hand hot water is plentiful, and electricity made from it inexpensive enough that it’s cost-effective to make hydrogen (many gas stations have hydrogen pumps) and to smelt bauxite into aluminum.

After a quick lunch and some hardware/software work we left for Pingvellir national park and UNESCO World Heritage Site. Pingvellir straddles the mid-Atlantic ridge making it an easy place to take a short leap from the North American plate to the European plate and to explore an important part of Iceland’s history. Iceland has one of the world’s oldest parliaments which was begun at Pingvellir in 930 CE. The park has well maintained trails, informative signage (in Icelandic and English), and many geological and historical features. We took our ambiance platforms and split into two groups each of which recorded a separate track around the park (visualization to follow). One detail worth noting is that it costs 200 ISK to pee (about 1.60 USD) at the visitor’s center but there are nice small lavatories spread around the park which are free.

Tomorrow we head to Heimaey, the largest island in the Vestmannaeyjar archipelago off the south coast.

(cp)