May 18, 2023

New activities

Antennas for the Cryo-egg are getting set up by Mike and Liz both inside and outside a pop-up tent on top of the trenches.

Now that we are 21 in camp, we have both new faces and new activities here in camp. Liz and Mike have brought their Cryo-egg to camp for testing in the depth of the EGRIP bore hole. Some exciting days ahead where they will find out how far down in the ice sheet, they will be able to receive data from the Cry-egg using a surface antenna system. It will also be very interesting to see if this small white sphere can resist the immense pressure deep in the bore hole. The experiment is carried out during the night, as to not slow down the deep drilling operation. Nicholas started the first descend of the Cryo-egg this evening. Speaking of drilling, we had another good day of production with 3 cores brought to the surface, and another first, this time Nico drilled his first deep ice core! Logging and processing also continue at approximately the same pace as the drilling.
On the surface Sveinn and Brandon from the Greendrill project started to reorganize the Greendrill cargo from airforce pallets into ready-made loads for the Twin Otter that will soon arrive here to shuttle the to their camp location some 300km NE of EGRIP. The pallet with cargo was for camp was also broken down, and immediately put in to use for staging retro-cargo for next weeks flight to camp. In the science trench Nico started setting up the Fabric analyzer (FA), Large Area Scanning Macroscope (LASM) and microstructure mapping microscope.

What we did today:

1. Drilled three ice cores, drillers length: 3.46m, 3.33m and 3.00m.
2. Logged two ice cores, logged length 7.05m, loggers’ depth: 2475.71m.
3. Processed 9.9m of core, bags 4454 to 4471.
4. Set up surface antennas for cryo-egg experiment, and commenced egg deployment.
5. Finished breaking down pallet for camp.
6. Started setup of more PP instrumentation in science trench.
7. Started preparing retro-cargo for next week’s flight.
8. Reorganized Greendrill cargo for Twin Otter transportation.
9. Selected skidoo for Greendrill operations.
10. Finished measuring temperature profile in shallow hole near camp.
11. Continued work on cupola setup of instrumentation.

Weather today: Sunny. Temperatures between -33°C and -17°C. Wind: 3-14kt turning from WSW to SW and decreasing during the day. Visibility: Unrestricted.

FL, Bo M. Vinther

Left: The Cryo-egg, Mike and Liz late this evening. The Cryo-egg (white sphere) has been made ready for deployment in the deep bore hole here at EGRIP. Right: Today Nico drilled his first ice core, so now he is both drilling and logging the beautiful core!