Back in Iceland

[Barb T]

Huh - I guess I never thought of the Icelandic landscape as scary! No big animals to eat you, no poisonous snakes or insects. It's never hot enough to get heat stroke or dehydration, and you can see for miles as long as the clouds don't settle in. Even with that, if I have a map and a compass, I'm set. And now with GPS, satellite imagery, and GIS, it's really easy to tell where you are and to plan field work. The only odd thing is that there's nothing for scale. Things that look close are actually big and really far away, and sometimes things that are small are actually close up.

So, we just drive as far as we can on a 4WD track and park the car:



We plan where we're going to go using a map and a satellite image:



And then we just head off. In the picture below, we're headed for the farthest tan peak on the right hand ridge. In the second one, we're headed for the fabulous tilted outcrop on the top of the ridge.





And then, when we're done with the day, we head back to the car. In the pic below, the car is over the far ridge on the horizon. I think we've walked about 40 miles in the past 5 days. My feet are tired...



And then we cook dinner. At least we don't have to walk far to do that!



It's been a great field season, and we've discovered some very interesting things about the rocks we're studying, and we're powerfully confused about some other aspects. But, we've taken samples that we'll analyze, and hopefully we'll figure it out after we have more data!