May 28, 2024

Birdhouse or Outhouse?

Left: Bird on the outhouse seat. Right: Dorthe raised the red flag to give the bird some peace and quiet, and not having more camp members surprised!

While our dome here at EGRIP have both a flush toilet and a urinal, solids cannot be deposited in either, so when camp members need to do “number 2” business, we have to go to one of the camps two outhouse tents. In front of the tents a red flag is raised, when it is occupied, and it is of course very important to take it down after you have finished your business in the tent. Anyhow, this morning Dorthe was greatly surprised to find one of the outhouses occupied despite the flag being down! A small bird had found shelter from the elements in one of our outhouses, so at least for a brief moment we had a very big birdhouse in camp, until the tent was reclaimed for human use.
In the drill trench it was time to deploy the Cryo-pølse in the deep bore hole, but the attempt had to be aborted due to chips blocking the bore hole at the top of the liquid column, probably left over from yesterday’s broaching experiment. After unsuccessfully trying to bail out the plug, it was decided to use the deep drill to get through it, which proved possible. We will retry deploying the Cryo-pølse tomorrow.
On the surface conditions ar getting more and more windy in camp, but despite this Susanne and David managed to recover one more ApRES station almost 30 south of camp, and work on preparing the apron for next weeks planned Skier operations continued.

What we did today:

1. Unsuccessful deployment of Cryo-pølse in deep bore hole.
2. Cleaning with deep drill of chips clogging up the bore hole at the top of liquid column.
3. Continued preparations for our intermediate depth drill system in white garage.
4. Prepared apron load pad for Skier operations.
5. Continued sorting/moving of equipment in ramp and drill trench.
6. Retrieved one more ApRES station, for a total of 5 recovered stations.
7. Logger calibration rig assembled.

Weather today: Mostly sunny and temp. from -25°C to -10°C. Wind: Increasing from 7 kt in the early morning to 22 kt in the evening and night, while turning from SSW to SSE. Visibility: Unrestricted, except for some snow drift.