In the Summer of 2017, Charlie Peck led a research group of nine students and three faculty members from Earlham that gathered on the ashy black gravel at the base of Sólheimajökull, a glacial finger that extends 15 kilometers from Mýrdalsjökull, an ice cap in southern Iceland. They were eager to start their climb, but first had to learn to walk. Read more at Iceland May Term: Truth In the Ice.
In the Spring of 2012 Charlie Peck (faculty), Ivan Babic (EC ‘13), Kristin Muterspaw (EC ‘15), Elena Sergienko (EC ‘14), and Tristan Wright (EC ‘13) agreed to support a group of geology and chemistry faculty and students as they worked in the field collecting geocoded environmental parameters and soil, water, and gas samples. Over the course of the next 14 months we designed, built, and deployed a series of open/commodity geocoded sensor platforms for atmospheric, soil, water, and gas parameters. This culminated in July of 2013 with a month of field testing working with the geologists, chemists, and their students in Iceland as they explored lava tubes, continental rifts, glaciers, and (dormant) volcanoes. Alongside this we examined environmental microbial communities, sampling soil and water in a variety of locations across Iceland and extracting the microbial DNA for analysis. Quite serendipitously we were presented with the opportunity to take samples at a small archeological dig at Skalanes, a small research station on an Eastern peninsula. These samples will be analyzed with an eye towards learning which animals early Icelandic people domesticated. http://eciceland2013.wordpress.com