July 8, 2019

The strange EGRIP ice

EGRIP skiway ready for Skier operations.


Today we reluctantly had to concede defeat in this season’s battle between the EGRIP ice and our winch motor. Never before have we experienced ice that is so hard to break, and our winch motor simply isn’t up to the job anymore. The drilling process was working perfectly, when we made todays drill test, but despite reducing the core diameter, we got another hard core break (almost 2.1 tons). Hence, we will have to abort further drilling this season, and come back next year with new ideas and more powerful equipment in order to proceed. Hopefully the scientific analysis of the ice we did manage to drill this season will shed new light on ice stream dynamics and inform us on how to proceed with the deep drilling next year.
While the deep drilling had to stop, Tobias and the surface team made further progress at the S7 shallow drill site with more late evening and night drilling. Otherwise work continued at pace in the science trench with a new record number of bags processed, and at the surface all programs are also running nicely, with both surface and atmospheric measurements running to schedule.
Finally we can now declare the EGRIP skiway completely ready for Skier operations, Chris having groomed it during the previous days – such a skiway is a beautiful sight to behold.

What we did during the day:

  1. Drilling 1 reduced diameter run in clean hole: Core break still almost 2.1 tons.
  2. Filtering the deep bore hole.
  3. Logging final run, logged depth 2122.42m.
  4. Ice core processing of 69 bags, including detailed isotope samples, last bag 3655.
  5. CFA measurements of 36 bags, last bag 3358.
  6. PP measurements in science trench, last bag 3566.
  7. Station for atmospheric moisture sampling and isotopic measurement is active.
  8. Grooming of skiway, clearing snow drifts from trench entrances.
  9. Drilling at S7 drill site, last depth 79m.

EGRIP population is 33.

Weather: Wind between 3kts and 11kts from SW. Sunny conditions prevailed during the day. Temperatures from -15°C to -5°C.

FL, Bo Vinther