A routine Sunday

From Saturday night. Carina and Aimee are introducing the Dutch dinner.

For drillers and CFA people Sunday has it's own routine. While people wash up and wear clean clothes for Saturday night, then Sunday is where the CFA people and drillers clean their equipment and the borehole fluid.

Today weather was a more well behaved than yesterday, so we could go out on the skiway and get our grooming done in preparation of the planned flight on Tuesday. It is still warm however and it may create problems for the flight if temperatures do not drop before Tuesday. The forecast we received indicates improvement. We do hope so.

What we have done today:
1. Drilling, measuring borehole, filtering and core logging.
2. Processed ice cores: 26 bags, from 3874 to 3899.
3. Calibration and maintenance on CFA system. CFA depth: 1730.85 m.
4. Grooming skiway with beam groomer and tiller.

Ad.1: Drillers report:
Drilling goes fine enough. Only five runs over Saturday and Sunday due to borehole logging during most of Saturday afternoon and evening and Sunday morning and afternoon.
Sunday started with a failure in the winch control. The problem was traced to the emergency stop circuit with a blown component in the reset button. This prevented both winch control units from operating. Martin replaced the component with one from our spare control box. Software/communication problem, probably due to serial-USB conversion, remains an issue, but hasn't slowed drilling.
Cutting pitch is still about 2.4 - 2.5 mm. We can alternate easily between two hallow shafts without a noticeable difference in performance so far, which makes life better for the drillers.

Borehole temperature at 2167 m depth: -13.6 °C.

Driller's depth: 2155.76 meters. Logging depth: 2170.38 m.

Weather: Thin overcast. Temp. -7 °C to -4 °C, 5-10 knots from SW during day, turning clockwise to E. Visibility: Unrestricted.

FL, J.P. Steffensen