August 5 – Kverkfjöll Summit Attempt

After our successful first sortie, we were ready to explore the geothermal areas at the volcano’s summit. Our UK collaborator, Claire Cousins of St. Andrews University, warned us that Icelandic weather could be very unpredictable. Now our guides were confirming this, sadly informing us that the weather would likely be bad for the remainder of the week, exceeding the several days that we’d budgeted for contingency time. We would have only one chance to reach the volcano summit, on Sunday, August 5 before the weather shut us out. We had also been cautioned by our guides not to underestimate the length of the hike ahead of us - 8 to 10 hours round trip to the summit — for strong hikers in good weather.

Soon the volcano proved that it wouldn’t yield its secrets easily. One problem was the ice quality. Since some areas of the glacier had melted away over the summer, we had to take a more circuitous, and longer, route. It was a harder slog than we anticipated, and with our equipment-laden packs we were making slower time than a typical, less-encumbered hiking group. By 4:30 p.m., we had been climbing for more than 7 hours, but were still an hour or more away from the summit geothermal areas. A fog was closing in, and there were more crevasses than our guides anticipated, slowing our progress further as we gingerly crossed them one at a time on tight lines.

We had reached the point when hikers were usually already descending, and we hadn’t yet reached the top of the glacier. If we persisted we would arrive in early evening, hours behind in beginning our science measurements, and inviting a long descent in the dark, or else an unplanned bivouac at the summit. It was a difficult moment, as we knew that we wouldn’t get another chance to reach the geothermal areas this year, but there was only one choice to make. Reluctantly, we took some parting photos and turned around to head downslope towards warmth and rest.

We had learned a lot on this trip, including how to work together as a team on the ice, and assist with each other’s science experiments. We had collected valuable samples of ice, rock and sediments, despite not reaching our ultimate goal at the high geothermal site. (Later, one of Icelandic friends, who wrote his PhD dissertation on the Kverkfjöll region, would tell me that it took him “four or five attempts” to finally get the data he wanted.) Our conversations with local guides and scientists had given us important insights into other ways we might access our destination in the future. We were returning with data to publish and samples to analyze. Already on the return flight, we promised: Iceland, we will be back!

We look forward to presenting the first science results from this expedition at the 2018 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union on December 10 to 15, 2018 in Washington, D.C.