Fieldwork

It's coming up to my third week of Iceland fieldwork. We've had mostly fantastic weather: though it's really chilled down this last week (ground frost this morning!), the sun is still warm, although the wind is chiiillly. Every day has been spent in the same few hundred square metres of flat, stony, open sandur - glacial outwash plain to you and me. With a view to the twin glaciers of Fjallsjokull and Virkisjokull one way, and the flat plain all the way to the sea the other. It's funny; you can spend hours involved in running a pump test on a borehole, dipping the water level, measuring the outflow, re-filling the pump with petrol, checking the groundwater chemistry, writing notes - then suddenly turn round and remember there's a huge FO glacier right behind you, looking amazing in the sunshine. We're very adaptable creatures, really. This is what fieldwork in Iceland has looked like.

Jokulsarlon

Jokulsarlon is 'glacier lake' in Icelandic. And it does what it says on the tin. Like most bits of the Icelandic landscape, it's both very young and constantly in flux. It only formed in the last hundred years as the huge Breidamerkurjokull glacier started retreating faster and faster, shedding meltwater and calving icebergs into the growing lagoon in front of it. Now the lagoon is huge, and swarms of icebergs float majestically around it, eventually massing in the short river that flows under the suspension bridge carrying Route 1 to Hofn, and collapsing spectacularly and flowing out to sea. Big chunks of ice wash up on the black volcanic sand beach beyond the bridge and are gradually worn away by the waves.

Last night we were lucky enough to see the annual fireworks display at the lake - the icebergs lit up by flickering flames, and rockets shooting for the stars, staged by reckless Icelanders who zipped round the lagoon in motorboats and clambered all over the bergs to set off the fireworks. It was heaving with excited locals and tourists, and we drove home at midnight in a wildly out of character miles-long queue of traffic on the normally deserted road.

Making holes in Iceland

Licenced to drill

I am off to work on a glacial research site in Iceland, to investigate relationships between meltwater from the Virkisjokull glacier - which has retreated nearly 500 m in the last 15 years - and groundwater stored in the over 100 m thick sand and gravel pro-glacial outwash plain. Could groundwater help to replace essential meltwater sources that will be lost as glaciers in places like the Himalayas disappear in the next few decades? OK, Iceland is very different from low-latitude mountain glacial environments, but it's a whole lot easier - and cheaper - to do research there, and many of the hydrological processes are likely to be the same. It seems that few people have so far looked at groundwater in any glacial areas, so this work is set to be kind of new and, hopefully, maybe, even a little bit useful...

I'll be working with BGS colleagues and an Icelandic drilling company, and the plan is to drill about 10 boreholes, mostly less than 15 m deep (I say drill; I mean stand around telling the driller what to do); use the boreholes to test the aquifer; and install monitoring equipment that will give me an excuse to go back in 6 months time to see what's been happening. Fingers crossed everything is organised: the pallet of heavy equipment arrived in Reykjavik by ship last week; the borehole screen and casing arrived by plane last Friday, only a month late (although is still stuck in customs...); and I deserve a gold medal for how much I've manage to squeeze into two check-in bags, packed full of smaller & lighter bits of essential equipment, bedding, ice crampons, Marmite, and knitting. I have our letter of permission from the Icelandic Ministry of Fisheries and Agriculture. My out of office email reply is turned on. I'm ready to go!

Ride along the river

We went for a very nice bike ride in sunny Hertfordshire last Sunday, bowling along quiet roads with surprisingly open views - for some reason there weren't so many hedges, and so the golden fields of ripening wheat border straight onto the roads, and you can see for miles across them and the rolling countryside.

On the way back we took a short cut along what looked like a quiet track between fields, with a ford crossing the river about halfway along. I vaguely wondered why the map showed the word 'Ford' written lengthways down the road, and why the river was marked running along the same line as the road. That can't be right, I thought.

But the Ordnance Survey had - as they most often do - got it spot on. The River Ash does indeed run along exactly the same course as pretty, high-banked, tree-lined Violets Lane. Luckily it isn't a very big river, and is actually dry along some stretches, but in places it was quite definitely waterlogged, knee-deep and bedded in sticky soft sand. We splashed our way through by a combination of pedalling and falling in. It was brilliant. And then at the other end, feeling just like explorers making it alive out of a jungle, we found a wonderfully helpful notice to point out where the road finally went its separate way from the river, just in case by that point we'd forgotten what a proper road did.

Visit Dingle

I'm on a one-woman Kerry tourist board mission this week. If you want a trip away from it all in the great outdoors but with a buzz of good food and good culture, go to Dingle. You do have to drive to get there, but don't spend all the time in the car watching coaches do scary things on the Slea Head ring. Get a map, park up and go walking, along the steep cliffs and long, long sandy beaches, or up in the hills - but you'll have to be a bit gung ho, there aren't many footpaths and the roads are narrow and windy and fast. Hire bikes from Foxy John's (which triples as a bar and hardware shop) or from Paddy's on Dykegate Street - he'll even lend you a hi-vis top if the weather's dull and misty (ahem). If the Dutch dive guy in the harbour hasn't emigrated to South Africa yet, see if he's fixed his boat engine and thinks the wind's in the right direction for an introductory dive in the clear, clear waters of the bay (he hadn't, when we were there, but I wish he had). Go for a sunset sea kayak with Noel of Irish Adventures, explore amazing caves under the sheer cliffs and spot Fungi the dolphin having his dinner. Eat at some great restaurants and cafes, but search out the cheaper (and just as good ones) - like the Bull's Head, An Canteen and the Goat Street Cafe.  Check out the farmers' market on a Friday morning. Go to Film Club night at the Phoenix. Try Crean's lager, creation of the young Dingle Brewery Company. Find a mammoth and giant cave bears and wondrous eclectic paraphernalia at the Celtic & Prehistoric Museum. Buy nice pottery and knitwear and tatty dolphin souvenirs. Eat gorgeous icecream at Murphy's. Listen to music at just about any pub you wander into; it'll mostly be put on for the tourists but it'll still be quality. Just go. Enjoy.

The edge of Europe