June 21, 2023

Dust logging and a blow from the NE

With 31 people in camp and many working outdoor all day, the kitchen is in full swing preparing a ton of food. Here Aira is helping Emil out with filling up the pots two times a day. Rations are close to double of what would be served under ‘normal’ conditions and includes baking of some daily 5 kg of bread, cakes and cookies.

The Swiss dust logger went down the main hole today and could clearly detect the transition out of the last glacial period that is associated with some abrupt changes in concentrations of dust in the ice. Unfortunately, the drill liquid was too intransparent to provide a good signal in the Holocene and the high glacial dust concentrations caused some saturation of the instrument in the glacial. At the surface working conditions became somewhat harsh today as the wind picked up bringing in moist air and snowdrift from the NE. With a solid overcast the contrast also vanished and turned everything white-in-white. Still, the Hungarian team continued drilling and one core was logged down to 14 m depth as it will be shipped to Canada for mercury analysis. The GEUS team went out to dig out their EGRIP weather station that was buried some 3-4 m down. As if that was not sufficient, the battery for the station that also needs to be dug out was placed some meters away from the station – at 4 m depth, so in the end quite a volume of snow was moved to surface by hand. No wonder that our participants have a good appetite at the meals.

What we did today:

1. The Swiss dust logger went down the borehole.
2. No drilling and no processing.
3. Lifted the EGRIP PARCA AWS to surface.
4. Shallow drilling and logging at Hungarian ‘tritium peak’ site.
5. Finalized grooming of skiway before it started blowing again.

Weather today: The wind turned in the ‘unfortunate NE direction’ where it tends to bring in moist air that gave some snowfall. Furthermore, the wind picked up and started some snow drift. According to the forecast, we should be back to normal tomorrow and the weekend looks okay for a Skier mission. Temperatures -6°C to -20°C, and wind 0-20 kt from SW until 9 am then E-SE.

FL, Anders Svensson

Nan is working on preparing his advanced logger to enter the borehole when time allows.

Meg and Alison logged and packed the ‘Hungarian’ shallow core down to 14 m depth.

The EGRIP PARCA AWS is back on surface after a lot of digging.