carry on camping

One of the problems of being confined indoors, supposedly ‘taking it easy’, is the B word.  I’m not the only who’s bored; Anniemay is also indisposed nursing a cracked rib, the result of a rather bizarre accident involving wet leaves, a sudden corner and a waist-high rubbish bin.

I decide, as I have done on many similar occasions, to try and sort out my photo library.  Each time I do, I end up distracted by an image from the past.  Like this one.

It’s the Summer of 1977 and the location is the Vatnajokull glacier in South East Iceland.  It’s the second largest in Europe and covers about 10% of the country.  It’s also a bit of a film star having been the location for Game of Thrones and a Bond film.

The photo was taken on the last night of almost 3 months ‘work’.  My main job was to provide a photographic record of the fieldwork being carried out by the others.  My other tasks involved heavy lifting; and there was a lot of that.

This glacier is rather handy for studying the effects of climate change because it starts more or less at sea-level.  You just step onto it, rather than having to climb a mountain first.

The extra shows the view looking back down the glacier.  In the distance is the Atlantic Ocean.  When this taken, the front (snout) of the glacier was around 5 miles from the coast.  In 1963 the glacier was on the beach, waves lapping round its snout.  Since 1989 it has lost around 200 cubic kilometres of ice and around 400 square kilometres in area.  I will say no more.

There are couple of points regarding the photo that you should be aware of.  It was taken at midnight.  I’m second from left (same beard, different colour now) and the bottle standing on top of the tripod was full of whisky at the start of the evening.

Best large.