July 6+7, 2019

A timeout

Evening sunshine operations at the S7 drill site. Sonja, Alexandra and Abby extracting a core from the core barrel and Tobias operating the shallow drill.

After having operated for more than 24 hours on the very limit of the capabilities of our deep drilling equipment, a deep drilling timeout had to be called Saturday. Almost all core breaks are now close to (or at) the 2.2 tons our winch system can pull, and the risk of not being able to break the core is thus too high to continue. Consultations with colleagues in Copenhagen on possible ways forward was thus needed, and during the weekend it was agreed to try to drill cores with a diameter 1mm smaller Monday after a thorough filtering of the hole during the weekend. Hopefully this slight diameter reduction will lead to a lower breaking strength of our ice cores.
Otherwise we had a nice Saturday, first with a fantastic cake table at coffee time prepared by pastry chef Kevin with Tine and me as assistants. The cakes were followed by a delicious Chinese dinner prepared by Nan, Bing and Aslak, topped off with ice cream and Tiramisu for dessert, Maria and Kerim prepared these treats.
While the deep drilling had to take a timeout, Tobias and the surface team made progress at the S7 shallow drill site with late evening and night drilling, as the daytime temperatures are too high for surface drilling operations. Indeed, the weather was beautiful this weekend with temperatures almost up to freezing and sunny conditions, and many people used the extra weekend off-duty hours to relax in the sun or go skiing around camp.
Otherwise work continued steadily in science trench, and at the surface all programs are also running nicely, with both surface and atmospheric measurements running to schedule.

What we did during the day:

1. Drilling 5 runs despite winch spooling issues, intensified filtering and hard core breaks.
2. Filtering during the rest of the weekend.
3. Logging 5 runs, logged length 15.34m, logged depth 2120.37m.
4. Ice core processing of 51 bags, including special gas-samples, last bag 3586.
5. CFA measurements of 33 bags, last bag 3322.
6. PP measurements in science trench of volume sample at 2090m, otherwise last bag 3516.
7. Station for atmospheric moisture sampling and isotopic measurement is active.
8. Grooming of skiway, clearing snow drifts from camp.
9. Drilling at S7 drill site, last depth 68m.

EGRIP population is 33.

Weather: Wind between 2kts and 8kts from NW Saturday turning W Sunday and SW late Sunday evening. Sunny conditions prevailed during the weekend. Temperatures from -18°C to -1°C.

FL, Bo Vinther

Left: Doctors use a stethoscope, Steff uses a screwdriver, but the purpose is the same: Diagnosing the “patient”. Right: The magnificent cake table prepared by pastry chef Kevin, assisted by Tine and me – we are truly spoiled here at EGRIP!