Today at Brown

DREKI CAMPSITE [Thursday Evening, Aug. 28, 2008] — We headed for a part of Iceland that for the Brown team might best be described as Goldilocks country.

You remember the tale of the fair-haired girl who tries the porridge of papa bear, mama bear and baby bear: One’s too hot, the other’s too cold, and the last one is just right.

Same with Iceland, sort of. The interior of the country has been marked for eons by waves of volcanism that have produced an impressive variety of terrain. Some of it dates back 3.3 million years, while in other areas, the surface (such as in a defined area around the Askja volcano) was shaped just decades ago. The volcano last erupted in 1961. Other surfaces are within that very broad timeframe.

The older terrain, according to Mike and Ulyana, is very altered, which is good when it comes to learning about what happened to the surface of Mars, some of it believed to have been altered a long time ago. But the older Iceland volcanic flows have been covered with vegetation, which “contaminates” the samples, they said.

The younger terrain, on the other hand, has been altered very little, if at all, so it bears little resemblance to the changes that have occurred on Mars and is of less interest to the Brown team.

But the area between Lake Myvatn and Askja, (see map) through which we are driving today, is a “neovolcanic zone,” as Mike described it. It’s just right — Goldilocks country — for what these Brown geologists want to find out about water’s alteration of minerals on Mars and how deep those changes to the chemistry of Martian rocks took place.

“It’s kind of like the perfect combination of lavas that are old enough to be altered,” Mike said, “but not so old as to be vegetated.”

The first stop for the team today was Namafjall Hverir, an otherworldly place of hills shaded in hues of browns, soft reds, grays and golden yellows. Along the slopes of the hills were geysers pumping plumes of fetid-smelling hydrogen sulfide steam that wafted along the ground and filled our nostrils. These geysers go down 1,000 meters and the steam they shoot out is heated to 200 degrees Celsius. It is indeed the Earth’s hot breath.

Mike Wyatt and Ulyana Horodyskyj test their core sampling apparatus. It needed a small adjustment. The Brown group — Mike, Ulyana, Jack and Bethany — decided to test the coring apparatus they had brought to take samples to ship back to the University. The goal was to pound a tube 50 centimeters into the ground and then extract it with a lever-like device called a core puller. The instrument had been built specifically for the team by a person Ulyana met on a scientific excursion to Antarctica in April 2007. The device was making its debut here.

The core worked fine. Ulyana hammered it into the ground with minimal effort. But the core puller couldn’t extract the tube. The wires connecting the core tube to the lever were too loose to produce the torque needed to pull the core out of the ground. A clasp needed to be moved, and this meant loosening a couple of bolts, moving the clasp along the wire and then retightening the bolts.

The scientists didn’t have the right tool, so they improvised, as they have all along. Bethany had brought a Leatherman (“It’s like a Swiss Army knife on steroids,” she said.), which has pliers that were able to do the trick. With the wire tightened, the core came out easily. Success.

As we walked back to the vehicles, Jack mused about how easily the team was able to fix a problem that could have been catastrophic for a remote mission.

“This is why it’s so freakin’ hard for spacecraft landing on Mars to do the experiments,” Jack said.

“Yeah, you can’t go back and get the Leatherman,” Bethany joked.

As we drove along, the landscape became more barren. The hills, so verdant around Reykjavik, had lost most of their color, reduced to a lime green tint. The ground was black and rocky. Some areas were dominated by smaller rocks, which scientists call float, because they are moved around easily by water and wind. Further away from the road were the bigger rocks, many of them boulders in clusters as far as the eye could see. Scientists call them outcrops.

The team took a core sample in a float area and some shallow-depth samples with heavy-duty syringes. They then ventured into the outcrop and chipped at some boulders.

Mike picked up one he had smacked with his rock hammer.

“There’s some brown stuff, some white stuff [inside],” he said, without trying to be more specific about the minerals showing in the profile.

“That’s where we’re at right now,” said Jack.

Still, it looked promising, and the team decided to keep it and perhaps subject it to spectroscopic analysis.

“Yep, that’s a keeper,” Bethany said.

We continued on our way, winding slowly along a gravel road that was little more than a rut in the black, charred-looking landscape. As we meandered along, the brooding Mount Herdubreid kept watch over us.

We arrived at the Dreki campsite as the sun dipped below the hills, and we began to set up camp. We arranged the vehicles in a V-shape to buttress our little campground from the wind, which whistled without interruption. We put up three tents — one for the graduate students, one for the professors, and one for me — and moved a picnic table in the middle of our sleeping space.

Around us were perhaps a dozen tents, all weighted down with rocks (like ours) to keep them from blowing away. The campground was the only sign of civilization for miles around. Nothing else was visible except for old lava, hills, Mount Herdubreid and the northern finger of Vatnajokull, the largest glacier in Iceland. The sense of isolation is palpable. As night descended and the cold set in, we began to prepare dinner. It will be a quick meal, then to bed — and more sampling tomorrow.

A POSTSCRIPT, FILED THE NEXT MORNING

DREKI CAMPSITE [Friday, August 29, 2008] — That last installment ended with us cooking dinner, going to bed and getting ready to sample in the morning.

If only it had happened that way.

We ate a supreme meal expertly cooked by Bethany of pan-fried fish (we don’t know what kind) and rice with vegetables. As we ate, the wind had grown fiercer, slapping us as we shivered and slammed down our food. The temperature had dropped into the 30s Fahrenheit, and we could see our breath. It had started to rain.

About that time, the park ranger at Dreki, Benedikt Sigurdsson, paid us a visit.

“I am here to tell you that a storm is coming,” he said. “The weather report says it will come maybe in two or three hours, and the winds will be 25 meters per second.”

He surveyed our campsite. “I just want to caution you that your tents may have problems. They may fall on you, but I don’t think they will blow away. I think you will be OK.”

Benedikt left, and our group calculated that 25 meters per second translated roughly to 60 miles per hour. There was a hut next to the campsite with two rooms filled with beds lined up in a row side-by-side, like sardines in a tin. One room slept 17, the other 11. But both rooms were booked — one by an Icelandic party, the other by French and English travelers. We had no option but to sleep in the tents and risk their collapse in the middle of the night.

Three tents, with two vehicles for a windbreak — no match for freezing temperatures, 60 mph winds, and horizontal rain. Meanwhile, the wind had picked up speed. The rain blew in sheets, blowing horizontally. Then it turned to flecks of snow. It had grown colder.

We were just about to retire for the night when Benedikt returned.

“I have heard that the storm is getting worse,” he said. “It would be best for you to stay inside.”

We needed no further prompting. We took down the tents, stuffed them in the vehicles and drove the short distance to the ranger’s hut.

Inside, Benedikt listened to a weather update on a battery-operated radio propped on a windowsill in the kitchen. The storm was Iceland’s version of a Nor’easter, sweeping in from the Vatnajokull glacier (see map) then veering in a sharp circular motion and billowing west across the country toward Reykjavik. Iceland ranks its storms from 1 to 12, with 12 being the fiercest, he told us. The meteorologists had given this storm a 12.

We were happy and thankful to be inside.