Gonzalo taking a pizza out of the oven.

Sunday pizza

Saturday we received Skier 61 and had the last crew exchange for this season. The camp has reduced population to 22. Sunday the day started at 12 with an outstanding brunch and after work at 19 we had the traditional EGRIP Pizza dinner. Gonzalo – thanks for the fantastic food.

What we did during the weekend:

1. Deep drilling core length at 19.00 Saturday : 8.25 m.
2. Drillers depth Saturday at 19.00: 756.11 m.
3. Deep drilling core length at 19.00 Sunday : 5.00 m.
4. Drillers depth Sunday at 19.00: 760.99 m.
5. Water vapour, methane, aerosols, snow and boundary layer measurements
6. Physical properties measurements.
7. Water isotope sampling for sublimation studies.
8. GPS and Drone mission near camp.
9. Improving curtains in the trenches.
10. Receiving Skier 61 Saturday. Goodbye to 12 and welcome to 4, camp population 22.
11. Moving fuel tanks, working on water system in Dome.

Ad 4. Drilling through the final crew change was aided by the one week overlap of both Marius and Karl Emil. Two new shifts quickly came up to speed, and shift work continued upon arrival of the new crew from Sunday (Romain and Svenja in the morning; Ji Wong and Miyahara in the evening). The primary EGRIP drill electronic section and surface control electronics and software have been stable throughout the week, yielding about 63 m of generally good/fair quality brittle core in five full days of drilling. One day this week was devoted to the UK egg experiment, borehole logging, borehole filtering, and a single test of the second EGRIP electronic section. The result of the borehole logging showed a continuing good trend in borehole inclination (ca. 2.4 degrees at about 745 m). A single filtering run yielded 8 kg of chips in the upper 100 m of the liquid column. The test of the second EGRIP electronic section containing two 400 V DC/DC convertors mounted in parallel was aborted downhole due to communication problems, which are currently being address by J.C. Hillerup. A second pressure tube containing these back up EGRIP electronics and motor control will be assembled in the coming days from the spare plugs, tube, and gear section from an old NEEM pressure tube. A second drill head and core barrel has been prepared to begin the new procedure of exchanging barrels from one run to the next in an attempt to allow temperature equilibration in the logging cabin before extracting the ice core.

Weather: Sunny winds from 2 to 5 m/s from W and SW and temperatures from -16 °C to -6 °C.

FL, Dorthe Dahl-Jensen