May 20, 2016

We postpone the balloon circus for one day

Malte, Kaitlin and Joel removing excess snow from the science trench.

This morning, Joel made an excellent suggestion: “Why don’t we remove all excess snow from tunnels and the already made trenches while we have a Pistenbully in the open trench to push the snow away?” So as the weather forecast is very good for the coming days, we decided to spend today and half of tomorrow “in the mines”.
There was shovelling of snow onto sleds, hauling laden sleds through the tunnels and dumping the snow in front of the Pistenbully which pushed it to the surface. Tomorrow, we will continue until Noon, and the balloon circus begins…

What we have done today:

1. Constructing lid/floor for staircase shaft.
2. Repaired elevator. It now works.
3. Preparing installation of ventilation ducts for drill trench.
4. Excavating snow by hand from tunnels and trenches.
5. German snow sampling and laser snow sensor work.

Ad. 2: The elevator has many safety features. One of them is a bottom contact. When the elevator was packed down at NEEM, the platform was placed in a bottom position, and it had to be manually lifted to operate. As the lift went up from the trench, we discovered that the hole prepared for the platform in the floor above was too small. It turned out, that the manual described a similar, but smaller model.

Weather today: Clear all day. Temp. -12°C to -22°C, Wind 10 kt from WSW to SSW. Visibility: To horizon.

FL, J.P. Steffensen