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Day 5. We have arrived: my favorite day on the trip. I woke up at around 6 to pack my stuff (we were leaving Hjarðarból for our next stay). Same morning breakfast: same enjoyment of morning breakfast (I'm really missing those spreads right now, and all those fresh vegetables....). We knew our itinerary when we had breakfast, but I won't reveal that now: let's just say it redefined what the term "fast-paced" meant for me.
First Stop(s): The Golden Circle (part of it, anyways)
We began our day by driving to Geysir.
A bit of background: Geysir is the name used to describe the entire hot springs system in its respective area, but the Great Geysir is one geyser that was legendary for blasting materials (water, steam, etc.) to heights averaging at 70 meters (~230 feet). However, its record height, achieved in 1845, was 170 meters (~560 feet)! Now, Geysir isn't at all as active as it used to be in the past; its decline in activity began in the early 1900's, and by the 1930's, Geysir was very rarely active. We have reactivated the geyser several times through various means, but to this day it is still relatively inactive. Fun fact: people commonly mislabel a different, smaller geyser, Strokkur, as the Great Geysir. I'm sure that was done at least a few times on my program.
Alas. Enough chit-chat. Down to the nitty-gritty. It poured for most of the morning. I remember waiting around for Strokkur trying to get some good shots and videos and getting absolutely drenched. I hung around the area around Strokkur unknowing of things like Mt. Laugafell behind it and the gift shop. Not taking the short hike up Mt. Laugafell was another small regret I had from the trip. I would have went had I stuck with the group (as you'll see, I start straying from the rest of the group over these next three days).
Map of the Geysir geothermal field.
Strokkur frames.
(above) Strokkur at large. (below) Colloidal effects.
My wanderings around the area.
(1) Translates to "The King's Hot Spring". (2) The rain made it look much less impressive. (3) This is what it usually looks like.
Saw Mt. Laugafell; didn't know we were allowed to climb it.
Unnamed.
Surroundings.
Nervously walking back to the bus, not knowing I wasn't late.
By the way, I don't remember if I already said this, but our bus was a charter bus. However, the company isn't readily identifiable because our bus had the decal "Free As a Bird". Very fitting for the GREEN Program. You'll see it later!
Everyone elses' wanderings (after seeing Strokkur and quickly glancing at the places I went to)
Our next stop was the legendary Gullfoss (translates to "Golden Falls").
It got its name from its golden appearance that occurs when sunlight reflects off of sediment particles in the water. There's sediment in the water mainly because the Hvítá river, which feeds the falls, contains large amounts of glacial water from Lángjökull. This glacial water is very sediment-rich if it isn't filtered by elements like porous volcanic rock. In the early 1900's, the authorities wanted to capitalize on the river's potential for generating electricity by building a dam. However, they did not have the funds necessary to follow up on this and the dam was never constructed.
For starters, mostly everyone went to the falls' lookout.
And then there was me (and probably a few others I don't remember seeing) who went up a fairly large stairwell before approaching the falls (and then went to see them up close).
Before the ascent. (1) Obviously, the Golden Falls weren't too golden that day (cloudy). (2) Part of the stairs to the upper level behind the info board.
The views from above.
Up here I was messing with some video settings on the camera like slow-mo captures, timelapses, framerate, etc. I had it on a small tripod, and while I was messing with it I saw Mumi, Adam, and Conor. They asked out of curiosity what I was doing, and I told them just that (with the settings and all that). Afterwards, I went down to the falls, and everyone else went up.
Gullfoss was probably my favorite waterfall. You might understand why once I figure out how to post videos here.
Falls-level.
Tried pulling the tourist selfie, ended up looking like I was about to sneeze.
And then here, at this moment, I realized I had been out of time for 5 minutes (on this day, the leaders gave us specific times to meet back at the bus to move on to the next location). And then I ran. I ran from here to the stairs, took a break, tried running up the stairs, ended up walking half of it, jogging half of it, and then running all the way to the bus. I was out of breath for the next half hour and would be referred to as "that guy" by my colleagues for the rest of the day.
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Þingvallavatn and all of its gorgeous turquoise from my window.
The ride to Hjarðarból was relatively quiet because most people were sleeping. I stayed up because I'm a sucker for landscapes.
A hydropower dam that uses Þingvallavatn's sheer volume as the driving force for power production.
Lots of horses.
I'm a sucker for what I'd call "cloudscapes" too.
Close enough to "touch the sky" without going higher than 200 meters.
Driving through Selfoss (the town right before Hjarðarból).
Finally home....
I remember getting to Hjarðarból and wanting to go to sleep. But that didn't happen because it was around 6 PM (18:00) at the time we got back and there was still dinner to be had and a capstone to be started. I don't remember dinner, but I do remember the beginning of capstones: as if it was yesterday. Because I spent the first half hour trying to find a group.
When it comes to self-assembled groups for projects, I'm the kind of person that waits until someone picks him. No one picked me until half an hour after it all began, and they picked me only because I made it clear that I was one of the stragglers. But boy, was I glad I was part of that group. We were a group of 6: Hannah, an environmental studies/political science double major from George Washington University; Clare, an environmental engineering major from Cornell University; Rachel, another environmental engineering major, this time from Purdue University; Kevin, an electrical engineering major from McMaster University; Jahred, an environmental science/engineering major from Harvard; and me (chemical engineering, Carnegie Mellon University).
We did about half an hour of brainstorming before settling on a central theme to the capstone: green roofing.
A green roof in Chicago. Helps with cooling the building, combating the urban heat island effect, and improving runoff.
I say a central theme because it wasn't exactly what the project was going to be about. A bit after that, Adam and Conor reached our group (they were coming around to all the groups). The baseline expectation for the capstone as a whole was to develop a sustainability- or renewable energy-based idea that would be possibly marketable in the future. We initially had trouble explaining all of our thoughts to them since they weren't entirely coherent and needed further developing. Nevertheless, the leaders were glad we had reached some kind of consensus and encouraged us to pursue it further. And for another hour, we did. And by the end of the night, we had our capstone idea. It was based on a scenario where the state of California conveniently proposed legislation that promoted green roofing by incentivizing the use of green roofs and offering bonuses to businesses that took an active role in offsetting carbon emissions. Our goal was to (under the guise of one "Urban Canopy", a green consulting firm) analyze the effect that large-scale green roofing in Los Angeles would have on the city's carbon footprint.
Los Angeles, the United States' second largest city, from space.
After reaching that solid idea, we split and called it a day. Before sleeping, I decided I'd pack my bags in the morning. And then once again, dropped like a stone.
I'm pretty sure I relived that day in my dreams too.
The key to my room. I'd never seen a key like this before and thought it was kind of cool.
The second lecture was about basic energy economics.
Prior to this I had absolute-zero background on economics, so I thought it was pretty cool to have a first exposure to it in the context of energy. I recognized a lot of the terminology in the lecture only because of some educational modules everyone on the program was required to complete prior to the beginning of the program.
This would be a boring lecture to write down if you weren't all that interested in it (which I am not, so I won't). However, a fairly good amount of the information provided proved useful in the development of our capstone projects.
We had lunch (Icelandic Domino's!) after this lecture.
We had leftovers that disappeared at the end of the day; they were later found in the bus storage compartment a week later for some reason.....
The third and final lecture was all about hydroelectric power.
A loooooot of what was covered was mentioned in the lecture was previously taught to us by the modules, so no one really paid attention here. I wrote down some things that weren't mentioned by the modules.
By the time we left it was around 13:00 or 14:00; everyone was glad to leave. And so we proceed to our next twist.
Note: there will be a side project following the completion of the blog's main content that will go over almost everything covered in lectures in detail (that encyclopedia content I didn't think people would be too interested in).
