Page 18 of Ignited in Iceland
‘I’ll call you when I’m outside your hotel. Around eight?’
‘Okay. And thank you for the lift.’ She slammed the door of the jeep and stood, waiting until he drove away. She was pretty sure he would be there when she came out otherwise. He saluted her with two fingers tapped to his forehead then drove off. It was mildly annoying that she thought that was cute.
Iris gathered herself, put Siggi out of her mind, and walked to the side of the building, looking for the entrance. She pushed the huge revolving glass door around and went to the reception desk to announce herself. A friendly man on the desk called Bjarkey for her.
Bjarkey was a smiley woman, a little older than Iris, with a blonde bob. Iris hadn’t been able to tell from the name whether she was a man or a woman and, to her shame, had assumed it was a man.
‘Welcome Iris!’
‘Thank you for agreeing to meet me.’
‘When I heard about the research you are doing, I was very excited.’
‘Thank you,’ said Iris, flattered. ‘I’ve been looking at some of your data. You’ve got an unbelievable amount.’
They took a lift to the fourth floor, then Bjarkey led the way into a room where the walls were lined with multiple screens. ‘This is our monitoring room. We have around fifty seismic stations around Iceland which all send live data. We also monitor the different frequencies and waves of the data to pinpoint locations more accurately. And we have live webcam feeds from some of the most active places.’
The sheer amount of information in front of Iris astounded her. ‘I’m not sure I can add much to this,’ she said. ‘I bet you already have what I was planning to show you.’ They just might not know they had it, but Iris didn’t want to point out to Bjarkey that they could be sitting on valuable data that they weren’t analysing.
‘I am not sure about that,’ Bjarkey said, smiling. ‘Why don’t we grab a coffee and we can take a look?’
Over coffee, Iris opened her laptop and showed Bjarkey the data she’d been collecting from Hraunvik.
Bjarkey frowned. ‘I do not understand. You have a seismometer set up somewhere in the town?’
‘Yes. I set it up yesterday. Do you have any in that area?’
‘We do.’ She pulled up the data on her own screen.
‘Okay, so we can see the readings are very similar, but I have mine set to record a different frequency besides the normal stuff we would look at,’ said Iris. Now she was hitting her stride. She’d forgotten any of the worries she’d had before she’d arrived. And Bjarkey’s open-minded response had helped.
‘This low frequency is not something we would normally look at because it indicates something further away. Not relevant to the area we are interested in.’
‘Right. But if you amplify the frequency like this.’ Iris clicked a button to show the change in her data. ‘It shows you that thelow frequency is actually a pre-cursor to what is happening later on on the higher frequencies.’
Bjarkey clicked the button, toggling the view on the screen between the two examples. ‘But how have you done this?’
‘It’s an adjustment to the seismometer settings and also a change in how the raw data is logged.’
‘Can you show me where you have got to? Have you any data leading up to an eruption event?’
They pored over Iris’s data for the rest of the day, and it was six o’clock before they finished.
‘It’s incredible,’ said Bjarkey. ‘And it is great timing for you to be here now.’
Iris didn’t like to point out that her visit was entirely intentional, and instead asked Bjarkey for the number of a taxi firm.
‘Don’t be silly, I can drop you at your hotel. I am going that way, anyway.’
‘Thanks, that would be great.’
‘Do you have any plans for the weekend?’ Bjarkey asked once they were in her car and speeding back the way Siggi had come earlier. Iris smiled at the thought that Siggi would have been waiting outside for four hours if she hadn’t insisted he leave.
‘I’m going out with some locals tonight.’
Bjarkey laughed. ‘How have you already met locals after two days?’
‘I walked into a tour company office and came across the most helpful guy in the country.’
