Weather is bad - waiting did not help

A freshly drilled ice core sticks out from the bottom of the drill. Krissy is preparing to un-mount the core barrel.

Today we had snow and wind all day and high temperatures too. We held the plane as long as possible, but weather didn’t improve. At 12.00 the plane was cancelled. Now we hope that the plane will make it tomorrow. Due to intense snow fall and an unusual wind direction, we have now an entirely new set of snow drifts in camp. Even though we groomed the skiway 4 hours this morning, we still need to do some grooming tomorrow morning. The new snow drifts are soft because of the new warm snow. However, in the drill trench drilling continued and in the science trench, most of the infrastructure is in place. It is quite ironic though, that the equipment in the CFA lab now produces so much heat that they have tropical temperature inside, and they need a funnel to let the air out.

What we have done today:

1. Drilling with the NEEM long drill.
2. Logging.
3. Building in CFA lab.
4. Groomed skiway in preparation of flight in bad weather.
5. Setting up equipment for Physical properties studies.
6. Mounted hoist in drill trench.
7. Maintained the seismic station.

Ad.1: This is how the drillers report looks today: “Drilling rather unstable, which we blamed on the extremely fine chips. Thus we changed shoes from 3 mm to 4 mm pitch aiming for more coarse grained chips. This resulted in stable drilling of 2.8 m long cores. However, most of the chips were packed below the centering ring on the middle of the 6 m long hollow shaft. We expect a narrow booster mounted below the ring will help move chips into the upper half of the chips chamber. Chips recovery is close to 100%. We drilled 11.76 m in 5 runs;
Drillers depth is 221.81 m.”

Ad.7: It turned out, that the GPS antenna on the seismic station was broken. A new has been mounted, and the seismic device has been reset and centered and the station now receives the correct time.

Weather: Windy, overcast, snow and blowing snow all day. -9 °C to -7 °C, 15-21 knots from WSW.
Visibility: ½ to 1.5 km.

FL, J.P. Steffensen