Greenland national day and voodoo in camp

Maggan excavates cooling tunnel.

Today is Greenland national day. It also marks the transition to a new form of self governance for the Greenland nation. We celebrated the day and send our best wishes for good fortune to the people and governments of Greenland and Denmark in the new form of Commonwealth.

It was also a day of voodoo. Now, we physicists are normally sceptical to magic. But the loggers today discovered it. At the cutting table a core would crack when lining it up for the saw. Then the loggers, Susanne and Bo, together with Sverrir placed a piece of core trough close to the saw underneath the core. And the core stopped cracking. This sounds understandable; but the point is that the core didn’t touch the piece of trough. When dealing with brittle ice, magic is working. The day at the logging table went well, and we decided that as long as the loggers can cut the core into 1.65 m lengths, logging continues fresh from the drill.

What we have done today:

1. Drilling and cleaning hole with the NEEM long drill.
2. Logging. Last bag: 1021. Depth: 561.55 m.
3. No Processing. Processed depth: 329.45 m.
4. Measurements in the CFA laboratory.
5. Grooming skiway wall-to-wall, taxi way and S-half of apron with tiller. Skiway is flat and hard.
6. Excavation of cooling tunnel complete.
7. Removing snow from back wall of core storage. The core storage can now take 4 m troughs.
8. Celebrating Greenland national day and with musk-ox for dinner and bonfire and a toast to good fortune.
   

Ad.1: This is how the drillers report looks today: "Hole cleaning. We used 3 runs with upper valve closed during descent to clean the hole for floating chips. We recovered 20 kg of spun chips and 2.6 m of core. It turned out that the pump gets rapidly packed after the filtering trip to bottom. The best option seems to be to not start the motor, try no drilling and pull up after the drill reaches bottom. A final normal run, 3.50 m core, showed unusually stable current, also at the end of the run. We drilled 6.09 m in 3 runs; drillers' depth 548.30 m."

Weather: In the morning broken cloud cover, in the afternoon and evening overcast and snow showers. Temp. -16°C to -9°C, 5-10 knots from S turning SW. Visibility: 5 miles, reduced to less than one mile during snow showers.

Field leader, J.P. Steffensen