May 30, 2018

Temperature gets more agreeable

The drill to go down into the hole for another run. Picture format only allows for showing it sideways. Left from front: Bent, Trevor and Steff. Right: Shimeng.

Today, we reached a season high when the temperature reached -10 C in the afternoon. It was nice for once not to feel the bite of the wind.
Camp life is getting into a routine where nobody need instructions on what to do. People come and go according to their own schedules. The drillers drill ice cores. The fresh ice cores are extracted from the drill tube inside the -30 C freezer, where the core is pushed through a vacuum cleaner to remove drilling fluid and transferred to a core trough. The core is recorded, but not precisely logged. And then the core is stored inside our core buffer cave. Here the core will stay for several weeks before it is logged for later processing. Inside the science trench, they are processing the cores stored from last year. We still have 400 m core from last year to process before we begin processing 2018 cores.

What we did today:

1. Ice core drilling in two shifts. Status at 20.00: 18.14 m drilled in 7 runs. Drillers’ depth: 947.50 m.
2. Cleaning up in camp and in cargo line.
3. Excavated excess snow from ramp to new balloon cave.
4. Last Nansen sled under repair.
5. Ice core processing 26.40 m, bags 893 - 940 (490.60 m – 517.00 m).
6. Measurements in isotope laboratory. Isotope CFA at bag 712.
7. Measurements in physical properties laboratory.
8. Water vapour sampling and measuring.
9. Surface snow sampling.

Weather today: Fine, but light cloud cover for a while in the evening. Temp. -10 °C to -23 °C.  Wind: 6 kt to 12 kt from SW. Visibility: Unrestricted. 

FL, J.P. Steffensen