Left: Nora, Basile and Diana getting ready for hand augering. Right: Vasileios inspecting the snow cores.

Cave people

In the caves of EGRIP you can often meet pairs of strange people who mostly reside in a cabin cooled down to -30°C. They prefer routine work and will only appear when an ice core is brought up from the deep cold ice mass below us. An intact piece of ice will bring a smile to their faces, while small ice core pieces are frowned upon and only reluctantly allowed into their frosty home. These people belong to the small family of deep ice core loggers, who are rarely allowed out of the shadows below ground.

Today, however, was different! Jan, a kind soul from the drillers guild, decided to take the loggers to the surface and provide them with some beautiful freshly drilled ice cores under the blue sky. While the logging family seemed to enjoy the change, they hurriedly hid their new cores back into their caves below surface – to prevent the precious ice from being exposed to the unyielding rays of the sun. Only logging sensei Khanghyun kept up the tough and stringent logging composure under the sun, while other family members, Mayu, Bo, Helle and Søren couldn’t help but smile at all the commotion on the surface.

About a kilometer from camp a small family of diggers and drillers where impressively completing their task of making pits and auger cores today. This interesting family do their logging themselves, as their more shallow cores have yet to attract more than brief attention from the deep logging family. Somehow the drilling family of three: Basile, Nora and Diana, seem more at ease on the surface than the loggers do - even though they also haul their cores to the caves at the end of the day. Down there, Vasileios, a close relative of the deep loggers resides. He receives, audits and documents the days’ bounty of hand auger cores with the stringent logger attitude appropriate for such grand occasions.

What we did today:

1. Replacing motor on deep drill.
2. Deep drilling core length at 19.00: 1.65 m.
3. Logging depth at 19.00: 661.12 m.
4. Drilling with AWI system: 62.62 m to 72.2 m.
5. Drilling auger core A4-17, 1100 m VSV of drill trench, completed at 14.4 m.
6. Water vapour, methane, aerosols, snow and boundary layer measurements
7. Physical properties measurements.
8. Water isotope sampling for sublimation studies.
9. Melting 60 cm of snow core on portable CFA-system.
10. Making bags for the 4 inch AWI core.
11. Preparing skiway and camp for upcoming windy conditions.

Weather: Sunny day. Wind from SV, up to 6 m/s. Temperature between -18°C and -7°C.

FL, Bo Vinther

Surface drilling with the AWI drill system, Jan, Mayu, Bo, Helle, Søren and Khanghyun enjoy the surface work.