Iceland Respiration chambers with YSI ProODOs provided lab-like capabilities in remote streams. 13 Who’s Minding the Planet? HEADLINE SURFACE WATER It’s not just great to be an ecologist at Hengill; it’s also a great place to be an alga. “Summertime in Iceland is a fantastic place to be if you’re in a warm stream and there’s a lot of light and plenty of phosphorus coming out, naturally, from the relatively new rock,” says Jon Benstead of the University of Alabama, one of the principal investigators on the warming study. Over the course of seven years, Benstead and Hood worked with a diverse crew of ecologists and biologists, including Wyatt Cross of Montana State University, Alex Huryn of the University of Alabama, Jill Welter of St. Catherine University in St. Paul, Minnesota, Gísli Már Gíslason of the University of Iceland, and Jón Ólafsson of Iceland’s Institute of Freshwater Fisheries, and troops of undergraduate and graduate students from across the U.S. Hengill Region Within that landscape, it's just so easy to do ecology.