Breaking news!  Brooke Weigel (one of our wonderful REU students) from St. Olaf College just completed a successful poster presentation at the annual Society of Freshwater Science meeting. This research - "Influence of temperature on benthic metabolism and nutrient uptake across a gradient of geothermally heated streams" was part of a collaboration with Adam Toomey (another wonderful REU student from Washington-Jefferson College) and other team members (Hood, Cross, Benstead, and Huryn, Junker, Nelson).  Way to go!

Brooke was also highlighted on the front page of the St. Olaf College's website!  See below.

http://www.stolaf.edu/news/index.cfm?fuseaction=NewsShorts#5317

Warming experiment update

The heat exchanger continues to do a great job. Below is a plot of the latest data, showing mean daily temperatures in the upstream reference reach and experimentally warmed reach. The arrow indicates the start of the manipulation on 22 October 2011. A couple of things to note. One can see the effect of the heat exchanger freezing up for ten days in December 2011 when temperatures returned to baseline levels. Second, temperatures were very variable in both reaches during the first winter, presumably because of rainfall and snowmelt. During this last winter, a thick snowpack buffered temperatures upstream of the warm water diffuser, resulting in much less variability. Our mean warming is 2.25 C as of the end of April 2012. That should be creeping up slowly now that snowmelt is over and discharge in the stream decreases.

1000th surber milestone!

The populace of Iceland recently celebrated "Sumardagurinn fyrsti" or the first day of summer, in April, a week after snow showers in Reykjavik. Seemed a bit premature to me, but who am I to question the ways of the old Norse, they were vikings. As we in Iceland revel in the beautiful weather of the first weeks of 'summer', we have an occasion worth noting-one that will likely define Dan and my lives for a significant portion of the future. On April 20th we collected the 1000th surber sample of the project! That should be enough to keep Dan and I busy for a while.

Cheers,
Litli Jim