The regular sampling for March went relatively smoothly, aided in part by a very warm, wet spell in February that melted a lot of the snow up at Hengill. The regular road into the valley was still blocked, but Jim Hood and Jon Benstead were able to drive into the reference stream for the warming experiment (OH2) and along the river into the Hengill valley. This made a huge difference, especially as we were trying to do the full suite of sampling, including chamber measurements of metabolism. At this time of year, this always seems like a lot of work to measure very little activity. Good to get those low-temp data though.
Our luck was not to last. Although we got most of the sampling done in double-quick time, it snowed before we had a chance to get the whole-stream metabolism loggers out of the streams. So it was long walks in and another round of "Hunt-the-loggers." It's amazing what the wind can do in Iceland. Here's what had been a snow-free Stream 7 at the start of the week. Where's the logger? And why didn't I pack in a snow shovel?
Got it!
The days are getting longer now and the weather is improving. It really feels like we're the near the end of another long winter. There's still snow up at Hengill though...
Eita!
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