How to eat an elephant

The row of ice pieces from the brittle zone are carefully pushed into a plastic bag.

The processors in the science trench are learning the art of patience in dealing with the brittle ice. Ever so slowly processing is gaining speed. As Sepp puts it: "They are learning how to eat an elephant: One bite at a time." Given time and patience, the elephant will eventually be gone.

We held some meetings during the day on how to sample and measure the brittle ice.
It was decided that processors will continue cutting the core according to the cutting scheme, except for the O-18 bag samples, which are taken from the outside of the SC-piece.
The CFA pieces are stored in our square trays and the CFA group will later select all pieces long enough for CFA and measure them. It means, that even though the CFA profile will not be continuous, we will get the best coverage possible.
We decided also that all gas pieces from the brittle zone will be packed in one box, while processors will record the length of the longest intact piece in each bag so that
the gas group at a later stage can select samples for appropriate analyses.

What we have done today:
1. Drilling and logging.
2. Processing brittle ice cores. Processed 24 bags, from 2108 to 2132.
3. Removing snow drifts at workshop garage. Grooming in camp.
4. Measuring CFA. Today we measured 20.9 m. Last bag 2507, 1378.85 m.
5. Finished converting Hatz 5kW generator no.3 from 1-phase to 3-phase.

Ad.1: Drillers report:
Two beautiful runs were followed by two runs that appeared to be plagued by extra
chips in the borehole. The hallow shaft became plugged during each run after thorough cleaning at the surface each time. It was decided to try once again the configuration
that was successful at NGRIP with the hallow shaft closed with a spring loaded valve
and the lower valve at the super-banger removed. The first run in this configuration was again plagued by chips, so the filter was sent down the borehole.

Drillers depth: 1862.73 m. Logging depth: 1878.59 m

Weather: Thin overcast and fog/haze, at 22.00 wind was gone and bottom inversion caused temperatures to drop from -18°C to -26°C in 45 minutes.
-26°C to -16°C, calm -10 knots from S and SW. Visibility: Between 3 miles and unrestricted.

FL, J.P. Steffensen