A true Sunday story

A 4 m deep hole has been dug for a new outdoor toilet.

Here is a true Sunday story: To avoid too bad smells in the main dome we have two outdoor toilets. They consist of a little tent over a comfortable wooden seat padded with insulating material and placed over a deep hole in the snow. When the tent is in use a bamboo pole with a red flag is placed in front of the entrance and when the tent is not in use the flag is removed. This year there has been a competition in hand digging the deepest hole for the ‘shitters’ and here we are: the record of this year goes to Tim and Lizzie for their 4 m deep hole. Congratulations!

What we have done today:

1. Drilling with the NEEM long drill: 13.46 m. Drillers depth 1217.74 m.
2. Logging 23.68 m of core. Logging depth 1131.29 m.
3. CFA analysis: 0 m. Depth: 442.2 m.
4. Removing smashed gear section from one of the skidoos. The camp only has three skidoos now.
5. Making food order and overview of drill liquids.
6. Shallow drilling at the air-firn village. Present depth 50 m. Air-sampling has been made at the depth 50 m.
7. Shallow drilling at the second site NEEM2009S1. Depth 15 m.
8. Pit sampling by Zoe and Kaitlin and temperature measurements in NEEM2008S2 by Anais.
9. Making a new 4 m deep outdoor toilet.

Ad 1: Driller’s Report July 19, 2009:
“Drilling has been very smooth since Friday after the full maintenance and fishing expedition described two days ago. Cutting pitch is 2.4 mm at the start of the runs and reduces slowly to less than 2 mm by 3.4 meters. With this reduction in pitch the drilling current will also decrease slightly throughout a run and only increase near the end when the chip chamber becomes fuller. With each run we get full chip recovery. On only one occasion the pump was packed with chips for a reason not understood. Inclination is 2.4 degrees and has been stable for the last two days.“

Ad 2: At 20:30 today the first unbroken core for a long time was drilled and we cross our fingers that this indicates that we are below the brittle zone. The loggers depth is 1230 m (drillers depth 1217 m) and model calculations predicted that the brittle zone would end at 1220 m. We hope – and tomorrow will show if all cores are unbrittle now!

Weather: A very nice and sunny day with blue sky and night temperatures between Saturday and Sunday down to -12°C and day temperatures up to -3°C. Wind 5-12 kn from S.

FL, Dorthe Dahl-Jensen