Fault Line Living With Lottie
The Fault Line Living team got their amazing adventure underway on the 1st of August, leaving Harwich International Port for the voyage to Denmark. Before this grand departure though, there was much that needed to be done. Christening their Land Rover Defender with a bottle of bubbly was just one of the many tasks that the team undertook before setting off. Packing and unpacking ‘Lottie’, as she’s now known, was considerably less glamorous.
However, thanks to the countless cubby-holes and hidden storage areas that Lottie can boast, it all fits. The real task is housing all of the equipment that the team will rely on to fulfil their expedition objectives; seven cameras, thirteen lenses, five laptops, eights sets of headphones, nine bags of carefully labelled cable, eleven battery packs, two seismometers and four hard drives.
In addition to housing and transporting the Fault Line Living team for the next 15,000 miles, Lottie must also act as a rolling studio. Every night, the team must record their findings and digitalise their content. That means editing the material, writing their blogs and recharging the batteries, both in a literal and figurative sense, for the next day of their Fault Line expedition.
As we have discussed in a previous post, the Fault Line Living project was the winner of the 2010 ‘Go Beyond’ bursary from The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) and Land Rover. That means the Fault Line Living team have been awarded £10,000 worth of funding for this amazing expedition, not including Lottie, their fully expedition spec Land Rover 110 Defender.
The Fault Line Living expedition starts in earnest when the team reach Iceland. Certainly, in geological terms, the project begins with a visit to the dramatic ‘start’ of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge fault line, a massive 18,000 km rift between two of the our planet’s major tectonic plates. Lottie carried the team to the point at which the ridge enters the Artic Ocean; a fascinating region, scarred with fissures, in the north of Iceland known as Oxarfjorour.
Taking measurements along the fissure is just part of the Fault Line Living project. A big part of the expedition is talking to the local people who live so dramatically close to the fault line, in order to understand what life is really like for them. Instead of being told of a constant state of worry about earthquakes, it emerged that Icelanders are quite stoic and even relaxed about earthquakes. It seems that seismic activity is just such a part of normal life when you live on a fault line that the Icelanders are used to it.
Tags: Fault Line Living, Go Beyond, Land Rover, Royal Geographical Society
