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.