June 9, 2017

A dramatic day with wind, snow and blowing snow

With all the snowfall, Anne Katrine has a lot of snow samples to collect.

This is the day according to our plan that a plane should bring in a lot of people to form a new camp crew. It is ironic that after almost three weeks of beautiful and stable weather, that conditions should deteriorate on precisely on this day. One is tempted to become superstitious. At 9 o’clock the wind picked up and together with snowfall and blowing snow the situation became more dramatic than we wished for. Of course, the plane was cancelled.
Although we had braced ourselves, several of our tents were about to fly away and we had to fight the wind and snow to secure them. It continued to blow and snow for most of the day, and because the wind direction is most unusual, snowdrifts has formed in unusual spots. The entrances to cooks freezer and to the trenches are half filled up with snow drift.
There will be a lot of cleaning up to do. Several people spent the day doing indoor activities in the dome. The dome got a very thorough cleaning and we got rid of a lot of junk so that the dome will look nice to the next crew. Time will show whether there will be a flight tomorrow.

What we did today:

1. Processing: No processing today. The isotope CFA laboratory has been measuring all day. An ice samples analyzed in the physical properties laboratory.
2. Drilling: Drillers made two final filtering runs and then 5 regular drilling runs. To their great satisfaction, the new EGRIP electronics behaved well and the quality of drilling was better than before this year. 9.05 m core was drilled.
3. Logging depth: 328.48 m.
4. Plane today cancelled due to bad weather.
5. Cleaning out in dome.
6. Rescuing tents from being blown away.
7. German snow sampling.
8. Japanese aerosol sampling and snow experiments.
9. Water vapour sampling, methane sampling, boundary layer and meteorology station working.

Weather today: Overcast, snow and drifting snow. Temp. -4°C to -12°C. Wind: 15-25 kt (max 31 kt) from ESE. Visibility: Down to ½ km during snowfall.

FL, J.P. Steffensen

Valerie is walking against the wind from the trenches to the dome.