Today at Brown

AKUREYRI [Thursday, August 28, 2008] — The team pulled into this sleepy town just before midnight last night, weary but excited to be close to the research area (see map) that will consume the better part of the next four days. This is what the Brown group had come for, and now, having arrived at a spot where minke whales are regularly seen cavorting just offshore, the prospect of leaving the coast for the interior had grown real.

Still, final preparations needed to be made before we left Reykjavik: The camping stove, an old Coleman model Mike had brought along, did not work with any of the propane gas canisters available at the local stores. So the team improvised with help from a friendly and knowledgeable clerk: a rubber hose and two brass fittings later, we were back in business. Still, we got a small bag of charcoal just in case.

We also needed ice for the meats, milk and other perishable products we had bought for the trip. Believe it or not, ice is not easy to find in Iceland. The grocery stores didn’t have it; neither did the gas stations. I asked three clerks around the cash register at the camping store. They looked confused by the request.

“We don’t need ice,” one finally said. “Our coolers are refrigerated.”

But he was kind enough to call around and found a store for us. We walked in and after asking somebody, found the ice in an icemaker that resembled one you’d find at a hotel — except this one came with a scalloped scooper. There were no bags to scoop the ice in, and we were unsure whether we should bring in the cooler and load it. We asked an employee at the deli counter. He handed us some bags and said nothing else.

Apparently, ice is free in Iceland.

This morning, we head to the Askja volcano. The scientists will take rock samples, dig trenches and take core samples along the way. The area is devoid of vegetation, Mike and Ulyana said, a denuded landscape, yet rich in sediment plains, caldera, sand dunes, and tuff cones — the kind of terrain planetary geologists love, especially the ones who are fixated on Mars.

“It’s pretty much better than I had hoped for,” said Ulyana, who scouted the region with Mike earlier this week. “There’s so much diversity in this really small area.”

“You won’t see any green where we’re going,” Mike said.

The team is most interested in terrain that has two distinct layers. The reason, Mike explained, is that the layers, one brushing the surface and the other below it, make a good test case for analyzing the discrepancies shown by the remote-sensing instruments that have been scouting for water-altered minerals on Mars.

“Plus, you have the possibility of silica [in the Iceland field research areas], which is what the instruments are hunting for,” Mike said.

Let the hunting begin.