May 30, 2024

Snow, wind and difficult operations

It was a day to be indoors, so in the evening Astrid, David and Grant decided to make home made chocolate for camp, mitigating our low supply of chocolate bars.

Yesterday’s calm conditions, turned out to be only a brief respite before we got less hospitable weather here at EGRIP. Today the wind picked up from NE, blowing air up the ice sheet generating snow fall, blowing snow and poor surface contrast in camp. This weather is no good for surface operations, so most work during the afternoon was carried out either in the drill trench, our tents or in the dome today.
In the trench, it was tried to use another bore hole camera setup, but to no avail, the drill liquid is simply not transparent enough to see the walls of the bore hole. Also, a last logging at the bore hole was attempted, but this had to be aborted, as the logger stopped communicating when it was about half way to the bottom. And just to round off the day, the tent for the Cryo-egg and Cryo-pølse surface antenna station collapsed in the wind, making a quick equipment rescue operation necessary! Luckily all the equipment was saved, but this of course meant that deployment of the Cryo-egg and Cryo-pølse is not feasible until surface conditions improve. Again, we are reminded that our operations here at EGRIP are at the mercy of the mighty Greenlandic nature.
Anyhow, David and Susanne had more success, testing out the hand-held ECM, in preparation for the coring we will use later in the white tent and next year for ice core operations in the Canadian Arctic. After some settings were changed it seemed to give a nice quick electrical conductivity measurement of a test ice core. Also the packing down of various equipment in the drill trench continued, as well as the planning for removing heavy items from the trench.

What we did today:

1. Test of bore hole camera.
2. Attempt at logging bore hole.
3. Continued packing down in drill trench.
4. Test of hand-held ECM.
5. Securing and preparing camp for windy and snowy conditions.
6. Saving equipment from Cryo-egg/pølse antenna base station.
7. Improving electrical connections in Cryo-pølse.
8. Made chocolate bars in the dome.

Weather today: Mostly cloudy and snowy. Temp. from -22°C to -17°C. Wind: increasing to 22 kt after lunch from NE. Visibility: Just a few hundred meters due to snow and drift.