July 9, 2018

Fun activities in camp

Left: Polar bear pretender Bo testing out the Doppler radar warning system. Right: Winners of the Monday evening quiz: Mari, Anja, Abby, Jens and Sonja together with quiz-master Lasse after having received their prize bottle.

At a remote field camp, small breaks in the daily routine are always appreciated, and Monday evening our doctor Lasse had kindly prepared a pop-quiz for us. Hence we made four teams, who tried to answer the tricky questions on everything from polar explores to rap-music. After an intense competition team “Pikernes Jens” won the prize bottle. Another fun activity (at least to look at) was the pretend polar bear crawling around north of the skiway. Jens kindly documented this event, which is part of our testing procedure for the motion detecting Doppler radar system. The system passed the test, detecting and tracking the movements of the “Bo-bear”. Good thing that I did not have to crawl more than some 50 m – human polar bears quickly get exhausted in the soft snow!
In the drill trench happy faces also returned during the evening hours, as bore hole filtering gave way to drilling beautiful 3+ m ice cores again. Hopefully cutters with a higher pitch will help keep the bore hole cleaner – as will our new filtering team who will start on duty tomorrow.
The crews in the processing line the isotope CFA lab. and the Physical Properties labs. all continued making good progress during the day, cutting and measuring samples at a steady pace. Preparations for the next flight period has also commenced with Chris grooming the apron and making a nice spot for the JSEP programme to make their tent camp.

What we did today:

1. Recovery of 60 kg of chips through filtering, drilling of two 3.2 m runs in the evening.
2. No logging of main core until 19.00, depth at that time 1371.76 m.
3. Processing of EGRIP main core in the science trench, final depth: 1356.85 m.
4. Measurements in isotope laboratory, final depth: 878.90 m.
5. Measurements in physical properties laboratory to 1345.30 m, measurements of volume samples and brittle ice.
6. Water vapour sampling and measuring.
7. Japanese snow crystal and surface monitoring.
8. Preparing for drilling at RADIX site.
9. Adjustment and test of Doppler radar.
10. Preparations for next flight period.

Weather: Overcast in the morning but otherwise Sunny most of the day. Temperature -19 °C to -8 °C. Wind from WNW up to 12kt.

FL, Bo Vinther