Stonehenge and the Ice Age: Sixty years ago, in Iceland.......

I was rummaging through some box files today, and came across this scruffy document. It's the original plane table map which I made with David Sugden (now Emeritus Professor at Edinburgh University) in the summer of 1960. Sixty years ago........... and the memories of our Oxford Icelandic Expedition are as fresh as ever. Well, some of them are.....

I am reminded how things have changed. In 1960 we walked everywhere in and around the valley of Kaldalon -- no helicopters, Land Rovers or skidoos. I spent hours every working day at the plane table, taking sightings, building up the triangulation, and putting notes all over the map and into my field notebook. No aerial photos or satellite images, no GPS signals, and not even a theodolite. Dave and I worked very well together, discussing all our observations endlessly, and learning our trade as geomorphologists on the hoof -- after just three terms as students in Oxford University. It was really rather presumptuous of us, to assume that we could discover new things and say something useful, having spent no time at all studying glacial geomorphology with specialists. But while we were in the valley, living under canvas for six weeks or so, we did learn rather a lot, and afterwards we wrote our first scientific paper, called "The morphology of Kaldalon, a glaciated valley in Iceland." It wasn't really very good, but to his eternal credit Professor Gunnar Hoppe of Stockholm University accepted it for publication in "Geografiska Annaler", probably because he thought that we were young men who should be encouraged in our efforts to undertake serious and meaningful field research. And so, after another expedition in East Greenland in 1962, and after a spell with BAS in the Antarctic, David and I embarked upon our academic careers.

Happy days..........

Some shots of the valley as it looks today. The glacier was quite healthy in 1960, but now it is on the way out -- more and more of the trough head / rockwall at the end of the trough is exposed every year, and soon the supply of ice from Drangajökull will be cut off.