May 16, 2023

Drilling three beautiful ice cores

Left: Nico monitors the ice core in the logging cabin, as it is pushed out of the inner core barrel with black spirals through the fluid extraction device that removes most of the drill liquid from the core and into the trays behind. Right: Iben and Emma are emptying the chips-chamber in the drill from the mixture of ice cuttings and drill liquid produced during the drilling.


This Tuesday the drillers again produced three beautiful ice cores adding up to almost 10 meters of core. We all hope that this stable mode of drilling will persist, at least for some time. Indeed, ice cores of such high quality makes everything easier, including the logging and processing of the cores.
Otherwise, we were all set to receive a plane in camp today, including having beautiful weather for flying, but weather-delays in Southern Greenland unfortunately meant that the flight had to be postponed until tomorrow. Hopefully the forecast nice weather for tomorrow will turn out to be correct, so we can be ready for a mission then.
In the absence of having a flight to take care of, a lot of smaller jobs that needed doing in camp were carried out, including readying a third outhouse so we won’t have to wait in too long lines when camp population increases. Anna-Maria, Jeppe and Romain kindly volunteered for that important effort. Bruno also got time to make sure that we have a power line available for Greendrill Twin Otter flights scheduled later in the week.

What we did today:

  1. Drilled three ice cores, drillers length: 3.42m, 3.08m and 3.27m.
  2. Logged three ice cores, logged length 9.65m, loggers’ depth 2458.44m.
  3. Processed 6.6m of core, bags 4439 to 4450.
  4. Test drive on skiway using Skidoo.
  5. Readied power-line for Twin Otter.
  6. Made third outhouse and serviced second outhouse.
  7. Maintained main water systems.
  8. Continued measuring temperature profile in shallow hole near camp.

Weather today: Sunny. Temperatures between -38°C and -25°C. Wind: Calm in the morning, increasing to 6-10kt between SW and W. Visibility: Unrestricted, except during ground fog in the morning.

FL, Bo M. Vinther