Week 4

During this week of class, events happened at lightning speed. The weekend was spent mostly studying the vast quantity of reading necessary to prepare for the test on monday. A welcome study break was simply wandering about town in search of new things. The picture above is the largest church in town. It was designed by Guðjón Samúelsson (the prestigious British architect?) and consecrated in 1940. While the building itself is quite new, Christianity has been in Iceland for more than 1000 years. According to Icelandic sagas passed down for centuries, around 990 AD the religious lawmaker in Iceland decided to abandon the old Ásatrú, or Pagan, ways and adopt christianity. Upon doing so, he threw all of the Pagan religious artifacts over the waterfall at Goðafoss, which translates to 'waterfall of the gods'. This will be mentioned again later in this post. Special thanks to Ívar for the (albeit remedial) history lesson.

With the test out of the way on monday morning, we began our second unit, Energy Technologies and Systems. This is of special interest to both of the coauthors, since it will be their eventual specialization and the culmination of months of research into (hopefully) publishable theses. The first week of this class was devoted to a review of Thermodynamics. Since this is usually only (marginally) fun the first time it is learned, we decided to take to the slopes once more to take our minds off the concepts. The weather in Iceland is very unpredictable, but in this case it was snowing quite predictably for 5 days straight. In near whiteout conditions, we made it to the slopes to experience knee deep snow as far as the eye could see:
The T-bar, behind the group in this picture was allegedly closed that afternoon due to 'avalance conditions' or 'high wind' or some other excuse given by the ticket lady at the bottom of the mountain. However, after Paul exchanged a few words with the Liftie at the top of the chairlift, he agreed to open the T-Bar for us to take a few runs in the fresh stuff. It was a magical afternoon.

There was so much snow, Kristel's skis needed to be scraped to remove some ice frozen to the bottom:
This picture is pretty indicative of the day as a whole. Note the lack of distinction between the snow and the clouds. This is expecially difficult when trying to see what you are skiing down. Your's truly had what has been described as the fall of the day. It was an olympic caliber faceplant when I hit a patch of dense windpacked snow and tumbled head first into the snow, burying myself up to the shoulders. Needless to say we were picking snow out of ourselves for the whole ride home.

After a hard week of Thermodynamics proofs and problems, we decided it was time to get out of Akureyri for the day. 34 of us piled into rented vans for a day trip to the Lake Myvatn area:
The area is about 100 km from Akureyri and has lots to see. There is the 12 m high waterfall mentioned earlier, called Goðafoss:
As well as a geothermally active volcanic area called Krafla. Hell's Kitchen is on the mountain, which has hotpots, fumaroles, steam vents, and an overpowering smell of sulfur:
As well as it's own geothermal power plant, which is one of several on the mountain:


Lake Myvatn is situated on a geothermally heated area, so parts are frozen and parts remain unfrozen, even in Winter:

You know what the Icelanders say, 'If life gives you heated water, make a nature bath'. We spent several hours in the warm waters of the Myvatn Nature Bath with temperatures up to 40 degrees C and spectacular views of the surrounding mountains. In such an idyllic setting, the time spent there still didn't feel like enough:

The road conditions were fairly treacherous, and driving in the blowing snow takes a unique skill honed on the snowiest of US roads. Fortunately the yellow posts bounded the sides of the Ring Road, otherwise road and frozen lake would easily blend into one another. Occasionally, a turnaround point was needed without any convenient spots, and one had to be improvised on the fly. Here we can see one coauthor in need of some help in freeing the van from a 3-point turn gone just a bit too far back.

Luckily the lake is not on the right side of this picture.