Hans and Tim both ran a half-marathon of 21.1 km here at EastGRIP Saturday afternoon! For those who don’t know: the air is thinner up here and the snow is not made for running.

After logging the borehole, the night to Saturday, the borehole was filtered both Saturday and Sunday. The Hans Tausen drill is now ready to drill shorter ice cores from tomorrow. Saturday afternoon, the acoustic drill liquid level detector was mounted in the inclined trench and it appears functional. Tests run over the following days will show how consistent the measurement is with that obtained with the drill.
Saturday night the gastronomical tour-de-force continued with Kenji treating us with a three course Japanese dinner. We got miso soup, salmon starter, several types of sushi, deep-fried pork (tonkatsu), chicken and tofu, a salat and a kind of mango pudding in rice milk for dessert. Just an amazing treat at the top of the Greenland ice sheet. In front of main dome, a decorated ice bar has been built over the last days, but the weather was not suited for outdoor activities, so its inauguration is postponed. According to the forecast, we are looking into quite strong winds and snowdrift in the coming days, so Tim is tidying up camp trying to minimize drift formation.
Sunday morning, the main generator did not want to restart after an oil-check. After an hour’s trial and error, Tim and Palle located the cause of the failure to be a defect control panel. They replaced the panel and got the generator going so we could get camp up and running again. The defect control panel gave a number of misleading error messages, making it a challenge to figure out what was wrong. Over the last weeks, we have had a few power failures that could not be explained by overload of the generator or any other evident cause. We are hoping that the defect control panel has been guilty of those failures. It was a true Sunday morning in camp.

Weather today: Most of Saturday had nice weather, but in the evening there was overcast and windy conditions. Even more wind on Sunday with starting snow drift. Temperatures -24°C to -10°C. Wind 8-18 kt from SW turning NW.

The acoustic liquid level setup mounted on the borehole lid in the inclined trench. The black bag holds a loudspeaker that sends a sound through the tube downhole where it is reflected in the drill liquid and detected by the microphone mounted on the other side of the lid.

Kenji in full force in the kitchen preparing a comprehensive Japanese menu with the help of a bunch of camp participants.

One of our heroes in ice core science, Sigfus Johnsen, is very much alive at EGRIP. His charisma works even on the screen, as the younger participants are clearly wondering about who this guy is.

Logging, filtering, Japanese haute cuisine and a main generator failure