May 28, 2019

Better weather returned – sort of.

Specific spareparts can be hard to get on the Ice Sheet, so why not make them yourself? Inside a warm cabin in our snow cave, a 3D printer is busy producing a “booster” for the drill.

The last remnants of the poor weather yesterday hung in the air this morning, but it eventually cleared. Polar 5 took off towards a point 100 km upstream from EGRIP, but up there, the weather was still bad so they returned. It was decided to go downstream with the P-RES crew, and that was successful. Tomorrow, the last day of operations with Polar 5, a second attempt will be made for the upstream point. We are preparing for a Hercules flight the day after tomorrow, lining up cargo to be sent out. The show piece today was the launch of a water vapour sampling drone. The flight was successful; but as it was only a test flight at very low altitude, no samples were taken.

What we did today:

1. Polar 5 flew the AWI P-RES team 80 km downstream (76 14’ 18’’N; 34 07’ 52’’W) where they performed polarimetric measurements.
2. Drillers made a few filter runs and a few runs producing some sort cores.
3. Logging depth: 1790.6 m.
4. Station for atmospheric moisture sampling and isotopic measurement is active.
5. The isotope CFA laboratory measured from bag 2648 to bag 2676 (1455.85m to 1471.80m).
6. Successful test of water vapour sampling drone (altitude kept below 100m until EGRIP obtains drone permission).
7. Building pallets with outgoing cargo LC-130 flights.
8. Removed snow blocks from caves.

Ad.2: Drilling is still troubled by lack of penetration and damaged cutters.

EGRIP population is 26.

Weather this today: Overcast with light snow in the morning, later fine. Temp. – 11 °C to -14 °C. Wind: 8 kt to 12 kt from NNW turning to WSW. Visibility: down to 3 km during snowfall, otherwise unrestricted.

FL, J.P. Steffensen