July 13, 2018

Turning a setback around

Left: Nico looking down the new hole, with outhouse tent tilted over behind him. Right: Julien, Pia, Vasileios and Nico celebrating the end of the hole digging from a few meters below the surface!

Another eventful day in the EGRIP drill trench. In the morning Jan J had readied an electronics section for the deep drill, and it was promptly mounted on the drill – too promptly it turned out, as a glitch in the mounting procedure meant that drill liquid penetrated into the pressure tube, subjecting the electronics board to 125 bars of pressure! Given the demise of this new electronics section, the drillers reverted to the setup used for the NEEM drilling, which kept tight and 3 nice runs were carried out during the afternoon and evening without the electronics running warm. The NEEM electronics thus seems to perform nicely, so for now this setup will be used for the drilling. At the RADIX site drilling continued for bringing the depth below the casing up to some 40 m.
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. Still all teams are working on ice from this years brittle ice section. Preparations for the next flight period continues with repair of skiway flags. Importantly one of our outhouses was also moved to a new nice deep hole, kindly dug out by Julien, Vasileios, Pia and Nico. Hence all our three outhouses are now in a good shape to receive visitors.

What we did today:

1. Drilling of 9.5 m of ice core. Change to NEEM electronics.
2. Logging of main core, depth at 19.00: 14017.32 m.
3. Processing in the science trench of brittle ice 1099.45 to 1117.60 m.
4. Measurements in isotope laboratory to 1183.05 m.
5. Measurements in physical properties laboratory of volume samples and brittle ice down to 1080.75 m.
6. Water vapour sampling and measuring.
7. Japanese snow crystal and surface monitoring.
8. Drilling 40+ m of ice below the casing at the RADIX site.
9. Readying of retro cargo.
10. Moving one outhouse to new hole.

Weather: Sunny most of the day, with few clouds. Temperature -16 °C to -10 °C. Wind from WSW and W up to 13kt, but turning S and decreasing to 3-6kt in the evening.

FL, Bo Vinther