The little Brinno camera we left on a monopod last October 2017 continued capturing images until the 9th of June 2018. Here is a frame from a sunny morning in March showing how much the ice drives over the moraine:
The camera managed this on four lithium AA batteries.
We just edited some footage of the fjallsjokull margin
Here you can see the recently exposed foreland and its moraines.
(video taken with 3DR Solo and GoPro5 – without gimbal – hence the slight wobble)
In October Kirk and Phil went for a quick trip to swap out the Rockblock units and reset the base station at Fjalls.
In October we swapped the Rockblocks to v3 and reset the base station’s fixed location.
View from Fjalls base station. The rover can be seen just above and to the left of the antenna.
Breida movement from the first point as detected in October. This shows the system is working well!
We installed a Brinno timelapse camera looking towards the glacier margin.
Today we set up two dGPS units to measure the speed of some of Fjallsjökull glacier. We chose an area of ice which is clearly moving forward towards the lake.
Here is the dGPS system setup on Fjallsjokull, with Jane Hart and Frey
The photo above shows a “quadpod” supporting the GPS units – which are an adaptation of those made by Matthew Roberts of the Icelandic met-office. The idea is to be strong enough to cope with winter and cast few shadows (which cause ice to grow). The system is currently measuring its position every 3hrs to an accuracy of about 2cm – using signals from the base station to help it.
the dGPS base station installed on a moraine close to the Fjallsjokull glacier. We used speaker stands burried in rocks to support the GPS antenna (top) and hold its 2.4GHz radio antenna (white stick). Shortly after this photo I accidentally kicked sand into the laptop keyboard – so it was not so easy to use after that!
View of Fjallsjokull with our deployement being almost in the middle of this photo.
We had a look around three glaciers on our first day in Iceland in 2017 – to check for access. Here we are on the massive sandur of Breiðamerkurjökull.
These new dGPS units seem to be accurate to around 2cm as shown in our test. This is for a close baseline (and at the moment doesn’t use GLONASS).
Testing the Piksi Multi from Swift Navigation. North/East relative position of rover – in a 96s test in an open space. The readings are quoted as accurate to 0.023m H 0.037m V.
This is a GPS tracker we quickly built as a test of tracking icebergs – it uses Satellite (Iridium) short text messages to send its location to us every 12hrs. Inside is a large lithium battery pack. The photo below shows a water test in the sink – just in case it ends up in the sea. We used a unit from YB Tracking. More info later!
GPS satellite tracker we built for a test on a Greenland iceberg
carrying out a repeat Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) survey of the glacier
In summer 2014 we went to collect the dGPS gear – but found most of it buried in old snow from the winter.
We also did an annual survey of the ice depth with the new ground penetrating radar.
Just added a new page collecting together most of the 4x4s we have used in Iceland
rented in the UK and shipped over to Iceland – the land rover has lots of luggage space – especially on that rack – plus you never wonder if it can cope with the mountain drive.