June 18, 2016

EGRIP phone home

‘Sofahygge’ in front of Main Dome Saturday night.

A few decades ago, communication to and from camp was mostly by radio contact to our office in Kangerlussuaq. Every evening before dinner there would be the classic radio call ‘GOC Sonde – Dome GRIP / NorthGRIP’ followed by exchange of news with Sønderstrøm (Sonde). Every third week or so when a plane arrived everybody would be excited to look into the mailbox for mail and postcards.
Nowadays, communication to the outer world is mostly by Iridium satellite phone and by limited e-mail access. Saturday is the most popular phone-home-day as for many it leaves the highest chances of reaching family and friends back home. Next week our arriving colleagues will mount a large parabola in camp that will be inclined by a few degrees above the horizon to point to a geostationary satellite. If that connection becomes functional, we will have super-fast internet access in camp. This is great, of course, but experience shows that the higher the bandwidth, the weaker the social interaction in camp. As usual, work ended earlier on a Saturday and in the evening we enjoyed a lovely dinner prepared by Helen and Iben assisted by Kerim.

What we have done today:

1. Continued digging the inclined trench in the drill trench.
2. Getting ready to drill at Swiss drill test site.
3. Started mounting ice core buffer in far end of science trench
4. Resampled snow surface profile in the clean snow area
5. Enjoyed fantastic meat pies followed by ‘sofahygge’

Weather today: In the morning, the only clouds were contrails from passing air planes. Later, we had scattered high clouds. Temp. -19°C during the night increasing to -9°C in the afternoon. Wind 6-10 kt from SSW.

FL, Anders Svensson