The loggers have caught up!

Nearly all drillers and loggers discussing if this is a non-brittle core or not.

A great effort has been made by the loggers to catch up with the drillers when the end of the brittle zone was reached. We have had three teams working around the clock and the record today was the logging of 119.20 m. The big effort was the Birthday gift from the loggers to Anais – so she did not have to work the night shift on her birthday. Happy birthday, Anais!

What we have done today:

1. Drilling with the NEEM long drill: 24.77 m. Drillers depth: 1244.37 m.
2. Logging 119.20 m of core. Logging depth 1250.49 m.
3. CFA analysis: 12.92 m. Depth: 455.12 m.
4. Counting ice core boxes in camp.
5. Shallow drilling at the air-firn village. Present depth: 64 m. Air-sampling has been made at the depth 64 m.
6. Shallow drilling at the second site NEEM2009S1. Depth: 33 m.

Ad 1: Driller’s Report July 20, 2009:
“Stable drilling continues but on a couple of runs chip transport was inefficient after 2.3 meters and drilling becomes more labored with high current and required “cleaning” stops. On these runs 3.4 meters were possible to drill but the pump was found to be packed at the surface with full chip recovery. The chips centrifuge is broken. The replacement has been installed while we check out the old one. Hopefully Bruno Stocker takes this news sitting down. The final run at the end of the drill day looked to be significantly less brittle and provided the first bottom break in some time. Inclination is 2.2 degrees”

Weather: A very nice and sunny day with blue sky and night temperatures between Sunday and Monday down to -12°C and day temperatures up to -3°C. Wind: 4-10 kn from SSE.

FL, Dorthe Dahl-Jensen

Anne pulling out the inner core barrel of the shallow drill at the firn-gas village.