Back to Routine

The tough life of a polar researcher – Louise and Brandon just spoils us with fresh vegetables and fruit..

The Media and DV visit and the exchange of crew has a big impact on a camp isolated 3 weeks in between the flight periods. So although all in camp enjoyed the fresh air from the outer world there was a BIG sigh of relief when the skier took of Thursday afternoon.

Friday was the day of training new teams in the drill trench, the science trench and the cfa lab.  The day was also used to unpack all the goods that had arrived with the skier and enjoy fresh vegetables and fruit at the meals.

What we have done today:

1.Drilling with the NEEM long drill: 11.22 m. Drillers depth: 1449.26 m
2. Logging 12.32 m of core. Logging depth 1463.58 m
3. CFA analysis: 8.80 m. Depth: 589.05 m.
4. Processing 16.5 m. Processing depth: 1413.5 m (bag 2570)
5. Repairing the broken skidoo
6. Making boxes for the office

Ad 1: Drillers report July 31st: “Yesterday on flight and media day we managed five good runs while making movies and saying good bye to three drillers.  Thank you to Olivier, Ji Woong, and Philippe, and we hope to have you all back next year.  We welcome two new drillers, Christo and Wang, and welcome the return of Steff to join Anne, Adrian, Romain, and Trevor to form the team to take us to the end of this season.  Although drilling has been going well of late, with Steff’s arrival we will take the opportunity to do some more focused tuning of the drill before we enter the testing phase.  So far we have reconfigured the hallow shaft in order to close the gap in the superbanger, closed the hallow shaft at the base of the superbanger with the spring-ball valve, and removed the lower valve.  We have had two short runs with high current in this configuration so far and will continue testing on the night shift.  At the same time we have an eye toward decreasing the inclination of the hole which now stands at 2.8 degrees.”

Ad 2,4: The crew in the science trench now consists of Lars M, Jesper, Jun, Li, James, Vasilis, Julia, Thomas, Christoffer, Emilie and Sepp with good help from Todd, Lizzie and Dorthe. Lars G, Kaitlin, Katy, Aslak, Atsushi, Anais and Daphne have left us. It takes a few days to get the routine in the trench with this change but I am impressed by the eager and skill shown in the science trench.

Weather: Overcast with light snow with patches of blue sky in between.
Wind 10-17 kn from S. Temperature -11 to -7°C.

Trevor has just pushed out an ice core from the drill. This core, like most of the cores drilled these days, are unbroken 3.5 m long cores. Beautiful!

FL, Dorthe Dahl-Jensen