The expedition
The Land Rover bursary with the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) — in 2010 called the 'Go Beyond' Award — gave a team a Defender 110 and a grant, that year £10,000, for a journey that would widen the understanding and enjoyment of geography. The 2010 winners were three young Britons, Serena Davies, Tamsin Davies and Adam Whitaker, with a plan they called Fault Line Living: to drive from Iceland to Iran along the plate boundaries where the earth moves, and to document the lives of the hundreds of people who live on them — how communities perceive risk, build, rebuild and carry on — by talking to school students, seismologists and ordinary citizens, and to make the record available to schools and organisations on their return. The car, a Defender 110 the team named Lottie, was picked up on 21 July after off-road and medical training in May and July, packed on 30 July, and carried a seismometer lent by the British Geological Survey that they read at each stop; the journey's carbon was offset through ClimateCare.
They left Harwich on 1 August 2010 — 'a distinctly unglamorous departure' — reached Denmark the next day and Iceland by the 6th, where the Eyjafjallajökull eruption of that spring was fresh, the rift valley shows the plates moving apart, and the island was expected to register up to 78 earthquakes a day. Through August they took their first seismometer readings, visited the geothermal fields and interviewed Icelanders about living on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, then drove south through Europe to Italy, stepping into the red zone of L'Aquila on 8 September, seventeen months after the April 2009 earthquake. Greece followed from 10 September: Delphi, the Peloponnese and the great trenches of the Gulf of Corinth, and conversations with Greek seismologists and villagers about a land that has always shaken.
In October the Defender went off-roading along the E80 across Turkey to the North Anatolian Fault, whose towns — Mudurnu, Niksar, Erzurum with its earthquakes of 1859 and 1983 — became the heart of the study. Iran was the intended finish, but British–Iranian relations that autumn were at a low, and a car stuffed with suspicious-looking equipment, including a seismometer oddly branded 'Houston Space Agency', could not pass as a tourist's; after 'many of our own mini summits' the team decided on 12 October not to cross, and Erzurum was as far east as Lottie went. Instead they drove north into the Kaçkar mountains towards the Georgian and Armenian borders, among wooden villages hung on the mountainsides with their cable winches, then worked back west along the fault through Niksar and Mudurnu at the end of October. They were home and dry on 17 December 2010, with the editing of interviews, photographs and readings ahead of them. The Society's summary calls it an arduous twelve-week, 15,000-mile journey exploring the realities of life along fault lines from Iceland to Italy, Greece, Turkey and Iran; the team's own blog records that the Iranian leg was never driven.
