June 24+25, 2023

Distinguished visitors at EGRIP

The 18 arriving PAX in Kangerlussuaq before departure to EGRIP.

It has been a truly remarkable weekend. Saturday, we received Skier 61 with 18 PAX. For 2 hours and 30 min we hosted the Danish Minister for Education and Research, the vice rector, chair of the board and science dean from University of Copenhagen, the CEOS director from University of Manitoba and the logistic director from AWI. It was great to show them our camp, ice core drilling and ice core science. We would like to thank all our visitors for the enthusiasm the all had. Also, a great thanks to the Skier crew for the difficult take off using ATO’s. Four ‘rockets’ are attached to each side of the skier and when sufficient speed is reached on the skiway, they are ignited giving the skier the extra speed to be able to take-off. We also waived goodbye to 14 EGRIPers. We will miss you all. Ending Thursday June 16th our bedrock bet on depth at EGRIP, liquid level change whrn penetrating to the bed and the age of the oldest ice ended. We are getting closer and closer to the bedrock so it will be interesting to see who wins the bets.

What we did during the weekend:

1. Drilled five ice cores (last run 1125, drillers depth 2637.38 m)
2. Logging depth: 2650.32 m. Processing depth: 2648.80 m bag 4816
3. Received skier with 18 PAX (11 visitors and 7 EGRIPers), goodbye to 11 EGRIPers.
4. Groomed skiway and prepared pallets.
5. Placed GPS over bottom of borehole (5 m West and 39 m South of the top of the borehole).
6. Taking small O18 samples so we can follow the age of the deep ice.

Ad 6: the first 19 O18 samples have been returned to University of Copenhagen and we are eager to see the results.

Weather: Blue sky all day, SSW wind between 4 and 16 kt along the skiway and warm temperatures of -16 to -3°C.

FL, Dorthe Dahl-Jensen

A rare ATO take off from EGRIP.

The statistics of the bedrock bet. Graph by Dorthe Dahl-Jensen