Melting snow

Sandur

A sandur is the outwash plain formed by meltwater rivers carrying sediment away from glaciers. The sandur in front of the Virkis glacier is where I've mostly been working in Iceland. I spent nearly a month out there last summer, and most of the last week too. It's a completely different environment for me. A wide, flat, empty expanse of stony ground, stretching about 10km to the sea, but so flat the sea isn't visible except on a really windy day when you can see the spray from waves breaking on the horizon. And yet if you turn around the view is to 2km high mountains topped by an ice cap with glaciers flowing towards you.

Two views on the sandur

Close to the river the ground is bare stones and old, dry river channels with only a patch of moss here and there; further away it's covered in moss and grass and scrub vegetation - dwarf willow on which the first fluffy, palest green catkins are just out, blaeberries, the first tiny pink flowers just appearing.

When you're on your own out there and it's not windy, and you're far enough away from the meltwater river that you can't hear the rushing water, it's so quiet it makes your ears ring. Except the occasional birds calling - skeins of geese recently arrived back from wintering in the south, great skuas gliding low overhead, curlew calling, and snipes and ptarmigan flying up from almost under my feet. The ptarmigan are still in their pure white winter colours and perfectly camoflauged for the snowy mornings we've been having.



Geese flying over Öræfajökull

Ptargmigan in winter clothes



In the summer it can be warm and lush; on a day like today it's a tundra-like expanse of snow, and when the wind blows it's harsh and wild. And it does a great line in dramatic clouds rushing across the sky. The birds thrive there, and sheep and horses graze, and although it feels remote, I've loved spending days there on my own enjoying the views, the silence and the sounds, and the sandur soap opera. Last summer I spent a whole lunchtime watching a great skua tenaciously kill a large gull, pluck it and eat it - gruesome but strangely compelling. Hmmm. Maybe it's not such a good thing to spend too long out there with noone to talk to....

Virkisjokull sandur



Iceland busy busy

All my blogging energy has been going into Geoblogy - some updates on Iceland fieldwork are there. A couple of shots from the last few days:

The Virkisjokull icefall

Virkisjokull G&T. With glacier ice. Fabulous.





Ice and rain

This morning I took a walk on the glacier with the rest of the team while we decided what we're going to be doing for the next week or so. Most of my work isn't on the glacier itself but I'll be helping out on the ice later in the trip. There was lots of talk of thrusting and sinkholes and geophysical techniques and ablation stakes. The glacier hasn't stopped melting over the winter - its surface has lowered by at least 2m since September. Then after lunch I took the big gold Nissan Patrol out on the sandur on my own to check out how my boreholes were doing. Had a lot of fun bumping around remembering how to get to them; and all the loggers are still working, which was very cheering. Although the increasingly wild wind and rain wasn't, really. But still, coming home with six months of groundwater level and temperature data, and some stable isotope samples, on my first day in the field isn't bad. Just in time for baked fish, red wine and an evening of graphs, Kraftwerk, Bob Marley, and bad jokes.
 


This morning was like this

This afternoon mostly like this

The lower slopes of Virkisjokull. For reasons still unknown, there is quite a lot of hay.

 

Back in Iceland

I came back to Iceland yesterday with a team from the BGS Iceland project. We flew from Glasgow to Keflavik, where Jez met us with the two BGS trucks, and drove straight to Svinafell. The sea was blue and the sun was setting behind the ice caps and there was still a bit of snow on the cliffs; the mossy lava fields looked just as alien and the horses on the grassy plains just as beautiful - it really is a fantastic country. Except maybe for the food at the truck stops. I spent a month in Svinafell last summer, drilling and testing boreholes on the sandur. It felt brilliant to arrive back here last night, seeing the glaciers get bigger and bigger as we drove across the desolate grey Skeidurur sandur. Everything's unpacked now and it's back to work at Virkisjokull this morning!

Sun setting over Myrdallsjokull



London town

A weekend in London. Strange to go back when things are very different from the last time. And stressful in the run up. But it turned out just right. First a productive work trip - Friday was a training day at the Royal Society for exhibitors at their 2013 Summer Science Exhibition, where the Iceland project I'm working on will be showing off its achievements. It looks like it's going to be a whole lot of work to get together something really good to wow the thousands of visitors to the exhibition, but fun too!

The rest of the time was a too-rare chance to hang out with old friends. To talk, laugh, cook, eat and drink oh so well and copiously, and feel better about the world. And we got to go to the Ice Age art exhibition at the British Museum, which I loved. Incredible Palaeolithic carved bone, antler and stone, and ceramics, with such accurate representations of the world around them, and yet such confident artistic freedom. They make people from ten, twenty, forty thousand years ago - our ancestors! - come vividly to life.

A couple of photos from the weekend:

Big red socks

I finally knitted the socks I've been meaning to, using the rich red Alafoss Lopi bought in Iceland last summer. Thick, extra-warm long socks with reinforced heels and toes, designed to be worn inside wellies. The pattern was a mix of ideas from the knitting gurus Elizabeth Zimmerman and Ann Budd, with a suggestion from Caroline's mum, Maureen for the decreases on the legs. They were knitted partly in Edinburgh, partly in Torridon, and partly in Kathryn's car driving across Scotland at Easter. And tested out down at the allotment last Saturday. Very happy with them!

Easter in Torridon

Scotland's northwest is one of the finest places in the world, and Torridon is particularly special. It has knockout landscape, geology, mountains, scenery, sea lochs and mountain lochans, remoteness, peace, wildlife, people: and when all that's combined with wall to wall sunshine, just enough snow on the tops for even more spectacular walking, and stunningly clear air - views all the way from the Cairngorms to the Outer Hebrides - well, it makes for a fantastic weekend. We stayed, unusually, at the youth hostel - well run and comfortable and full of happy hill walkers and climbers. Decided that in the wintry conditions we weren't up for scrambling the ridge of Liathach, one of the Torridon 'giants', which I've been longing to climb for years, and instead chose two lesser in stature but no less wonderful hills. Slioch on Saturday, and Sgorr nan Lochain Uaine (the peak of the blue lochans, although they're icy white lochans at the moment) on Sunday. We bumped into two people in total over the two days, slapped on the sunscreen, slogged up snowy corrie slopes and precariously stepped across narrow snowy ridges, and were rewarded with about the best views in the country. And lots of Easter chocolate too, of course!

Liathach morning reflections

Southwest ridge of Sgorr nan Lochan Uaine

The sportingly snowy east ridge of Slioch

Torridon sunset