May 29, 2019

Crevasses – more than 600 km from the coast?

EGRIP skiway ready to receive LC-130 flight. EGRIP camp is in the distance to the right where Polar 5, a modernized 1944 Douglas Dakota or DC3 can be seen.

The last scheduled AWI Polar 5 flight today took an unexpected turn. Weather was really nice so the AWI team took off to drill a shallow core and do a p-RES survey at a point 121 km upstream from EGRIP. Quite unexpectedly, they returned an hour later. They couldn’t land at the site due to crevasses. If you take a look at your Greenland map (or Google Earth for that matter) and plot in the position given below, it is quite remarkable to find crevasses that far into the Greenland Ice Sheet. Here at EGRIP we are safe however, as this area has been carefully surveyed. Our drillers are in a better mood today, as it appears that there are no more metal parts bothering them. The New York Air Guard arrived to Kangerlussuaq today to begin their next round of Hercules flights to Summit Camp, to Raven Site and to EGRIP. We have a planned flight tomorrow, but due to late arrival of planes, the Air Guard will not be able to fly before lunch time, and that might be so late in the day that our skiway becomes soft so we might have to postpone our flight to Friday.

What we did today:

1. Polar 5 flew the AWI P-RES and drilling team 121 km upstream to (74 38’ 14’’N; 37 33’ 57’’W) where they could not land due to crevasses in the area. AWI projects now concluded.
2. Fueled and made Polar 5 ready to fly to Iceland tomorrow early morning.
3. Drillers made a few runs producing beautiful cores.
4. Logging ice cores. Logging depth: 1799.7 m.
5. Station for atmospheric moisture sampling and isotopic measurement is active.
6. The isotope CFA laboratory measured from bag 2677 to bag 2705 (1471.80m to 1487.75m).
7. Successful test of water vapour sampling drone (altitude kept below 100m until EGRIP obtains drone permission). It took samples.
8. Grooming skiway and writing skiway report.
9. Removed snow blocks from caves.

Ad.2: The trouble with metal parts in the hole seems to be gone. High drilling current seems to be related to damaged spirals (made by the metal parts). A new core tube will installed tomorrow.

EGRIP population is 26.

Weather this today: Fine, with a few high clouds in the afternoon. Temp. – 11 °C to -21 °C. Wind: 4 kt to 10 kt from NW. Visibility: Unrestricted.

FL, J.P. Steffensen