Summer Coming Slowly This Year

Delor working on the sidechannel experiment.
Yes, it is sunny, but cold!

We have arrived in Iceland for the 2015 field season and summer is slowly trying to catch up with us.  It has been a long and snowy winter in Iceland and this summer is expected to be a relatively cold one. That said, we have had some wonderfully sunny days this past week.  As a result of the intense winter, many of our streams remained covered with snow and ice longer than anticipated and our experiments are running a little behind schedule.  So, this has meant that the team (primarily Jim Hood and the early crew that has helped to set up the experiments) has been constantly occupied with hard field work to get things set up and underway.  The St. Kate's crew has been scattered among the various efforts since our arrival and we don't even have a team photo to post yet, as all of us have been in different locations and out in the field on different days.  But, spirits are strong and we are having fun.  The St. Kate's team is enjoying Iceland, getting to know the Icelandic scientists and the larger team, and learning much about the work to come.  

Delor and Jim tinkering with the temperatures
in the header tanks that feed water to the channels.

Delor will be in charge of running the streamside channel experiment where we are warming a cold stream to 5 different temperatures and 6 levels of nitrogen enrichment.  As a result, she has been working with Jim Hood to get this experiment set up and to learn the ins and outs of managing the flows, temperatures, and nutrient additions so that she can troubleshoot the experiment as needed throughout the summer.  I was happy to hear from them as they returned from the field quite late last night that the experiment is now fully up and running.  This is a huge accomplishment and we are grateful to them for their amazing work on this.  So, it looks like we are now officially underway.

Tomorrow, we also start adding 15N (a heavy naturally occurring isotope of nitrogen that can be used to track the movement of nitrogen in our streams) to 4 of the streams in Hengill that span our temperature gradient.  We will sample the stream intensively over the next 5 days and continue sampling over the course of the summer to monitor the movement of our isotope through the bacteria, algae, and invertebrates. So, we are ramping up and the team is learning all of the procedures needed for the sampling.  We can feel the calm before the sampling storm.....

Bree hiking close to the channel experiment site.
While the landscape is still a bit brown and snowy,
the hot pots are steamy! 

Bree and Abbi arrived last Sunday and immediately went to the field to help with the channels.  They had a chance to do some hiking that day as well, and just yesterday they spent some time exploring Reykjavik.  They will be crucial members of the team this summer and I am excited to get our sampling underway this week.  In fact, we will be camping out at Hengill a few nights this week to collect diel samples - we will be collecting gas samples from the streams every hour for 24 hours and helping to check the 15N drips.  So, more to follow soon and we will be sure to get a few team photos!  

View of Reykjavik from the top of the Hallgrimskirkja.