May 19, 2023

A Twin Otter in camp

The Twin Otter in camp, in front of the Greendrill cargo to be shuttled by the plane from EGRIP to the NE ASIG site.


Today we got a new visitor in camp, a Twin Otter, which is small twin-engine plane that can land on skis. This plane will do several shuttle flights in the coming days in order to transport the Greendrill team to their survey site (NE ASIG) some 300km NE of EGRIP. Today they managed to do the first flight surveying the site and marking out a small landing area to be used for future missions. Flying in with the plane we got 4 new people in camp: Andre, Brian and Cullen (the Twin Otter flight crew) as well as Sridhar from the Greendrill science team. Hence camp population has now increased to 25, a fairly busy camp.
In the trench drilling is ongoing with another two successful runs today, making good use of the parts that we got into camp last flight. Logging and especially processing increased in speed with Nico getting the assistance of Anders in the science trench. First fabric data, indicate that we still see a vertical girdle in the crystal orientation of the ice.
The first Cryo-egg deployment in the bore hole showed a loss of contact with the egg at some 1100m of depth. Liz and Mike hope to increase the contact range with some tuning of the antenna array and adjustments inside the egg during the coming days. On the surface the staging retro-cargo for next week’s flight to camp was finalized with two airforce pallets being ready for shipment.

What we did today:

  1. Drilled two ice cores, drillers length: 3.36m and 3.26m.
  2. Logged two ice cores, logged length 6.45m, loggers’ depth: 2482.16 m
  3. Processed 13.2m of core, bags 4472 to 4495.
  4. Deployed Cryo-egg down to 1100m.
  5. New PP instrumentation in science trench set up.
  6. Finished preparing retro-cargo for next week’s flight.
  7. Received and fueled Twin Otter twice.
  8. Twin Otter made first recon flight to NE ASIG site.
  9. Continued work on cupola setup of instrumentation.
  10. Leveling of drillers workshop.

Weather today: Cloudy in the morning turning sunny during the day. Temperatures between -28°C and -15°C. Wind: 4-14kt turning from SW to S and increasing during the day. Visibility: Unrestricted.

FL, Bo M. Vinther