The sweet sulfurous stench of successful science!

Good news faithful followers! The coolers, channels, and piping are all in place. We've successfully plumbed all components together and have water flowing in the channels. The plan is to let the system run without tiles for 3-4 days to work out the kinks and and get the whole thing operation for our 8-week experiment by the middle of May.

PI's Cross and Benstead (in association with visiting professor Bob Hall from the University of Wyoming) steadfastly transporting the channels the kilometer (or so) out to our hot pots.

The coolers in place and plumbed into the heat exchange system. 

Assigning temperature treatments to channels in a randomized 3 block design.

Success! Water flowing in our channels for the first time!

Many thanks to undergraduate scholar Raquel (University of Barcelona) for coming out on this particularly damp afternoon to help assemble the final pieces. 

Streamside channels

Things are really coming together on the streamside channels. We expect that we'll have water flowing in them by this time tomorrow (late Thursday afternoon). Today, on what was probably the most beautiful day I've ever experienced out at Hengill, we got the channel racks assembled and finished construction on the dam.  The dam will provide a consistent water reservoir that will feed our channels all summer.

Our finished dam, the inlet pipe for our channels, and a nice pool of water (Lake Allison) 

The assembled PVC pipe frame that the channels will sit on. You can see from these photos that the snow is melty quickly now. It was even a sweat inducing 12 C (53 F) out there today!

The channels prepped and ready to for delivery tomorrow. Stay posted and soon you'll see some flowing channel action!

HEX2 construction: Days 4 and 5

Day 4 of the HEX2 installation started with the uncoiling and joining of the 600 feet of 2-inch tubing. Once completed, we were able to get water flowing down it as it lay along the channel. We waited until the next day to move it over to the heat exchanger site.

Alex also donned a pair of chest waders and plumbed the depths of the big 25C pool. It's deeper than we thought! Deeper than he could go anyway. That's good for us: plenty of volume is great for the heat exchangers.

Other activities on Day 4 included placing the spiral heat exchanger in the 50C hot pot and prepping the other two heat exchangers for deployment (or, more appropriately, LAUNCH).

Day 5 began with a slight delay, as the water in the 2-inch tubing had frozen (it has been unseasonably cold in Iceland this spring). Once flowing again, we moved the tubing over to the site. We had running water - a major milestone.

All that remained was to launch the straight heat exchangers and connect up the rest of the tubing and valves.

We turned the valve on the 2-inch feed and found we had hot and cold running water! It was time to celebrate with the customary can of Gull.

We ended the day by tweaking the valves to manipulate temperature in the five outflows. Before too long we had buckets at around 6C (ambient), 11C, 16C, 21C, and 25C. Not bad, but we can do better. In fact, we're headed up there now to play around with it some more. Everything downstream of our work (header tanks, channels) is being done by the Montana State crew (gulp...), who arrive soon. Watch this space as the whole channel set-up is completed and the experiment begins on June 1.

HEX2 construction: Days 2 and 3

Alex Huryn, Philip Johnson and I are hard at work putting together the new heat exchanger, which will be hooked up to replicated streamside channels running at five different temperatures. It's a lot more complicated than the heat exchanger we installed in the valley two years ago, so all our fingers are crossed. Tanner (who will be running the experiment this summer) posted a shot of one of the heat exchangers yesterday. We now have all the heat exchangers built. Here's a shot of them on the floor at the lab. Building them indoors was a smart move.

We cable-tied them to ladders to stabilize them, and loaded them up in the truck, along with a load of the two-inch tubing that will supply water to the heat exchangers.

We drove up to the site along the river, which is thankfully open, despite the snow that fell while I was in the US for a week. Unfortunately, the weather wasn't being very kind. Cold, sleeting or hailing, and blowing about 30 mph. Very pleasant.

We got the HEXs to the site, along with some of the tubing. Then we called it a day.

Yesterday, we turned up at the site with the rest of the SIX HUNDRED FEET of 2-inch tubing we will need. This little lot weighed almost 500 pounds and all of it had to be schlepped about 3/4 of a mile across soft snow. Each of the coils weighs 50-70 lbs, so Alex and I got quite a work-out (Philip was doing the NON-manual labor - he is the engineer, after all). Once again, our intrepid leader Dr. Wyatt Cross was all too conspicuous in his absence. He never seems to be around when we are putting heat exchangers together. Hmmm...

By the end of the third day we had all the tubing at the site and Philip had a lot of the fittings sorted out at the hot pool. A good day's work.

We are just about to head up again for the fourth day. Wish us luck.

Experimental Channels

Equipment is really starting to come together for this summer's experimental channels! Our very talented engineer (Dr. Philip Johnson, pictured below) and the good Dr. Jon Benstead (not pictured, but no doubt hard at work!) have just finished construction of heat exchanger #1. One more left to build, and then begins the arduous task of lugging everything out to our geothermal hot pots. Stay posted for continuing details as this exciting project come online!  

The snails are coming!

Snails (Radix peregra) are only found in Hengill's warmer streams, so one response to the experimental warming of Stream 7 that we hoped to see was snail invasion. It's happening.

This is pretty exciting, as snails can reach high biomass, with obvious consequences for algal standing crop, not to mention other grazer taxa. It's going to be interesting to see what their abundances look like during the second summer of warming.

Sigur Rós

It's not science but I had to post this. Regular readers will know we're big fans. It is my prediction that the new album will prove, once and for all, that Sigur Rós are not actually from Iceland. They're from another planet.