June 14, 2017

Four ice core drillings and a birthday

Happy birthday Nicolai!

Today there has been drilling activities at four different sites in camp. The deep drilling had a broken piece of core in the hole from yesterday night, but after recovering it drilling progressed well with 15 m of ice core drilled today. A German intermediate drill has been set up for testing and the first meter of ice was recovered. At the Swiss site a second pilot hole has been initiated using the Swiss shallow drill that went to 22 meters depth. Finally, the Danish Hans Tausen (HT) drill has been made ready for firn gas drilling and it obtained a few meters of core. Today is Nicolai’s birthday, so we had an aperitif with freshly drilled ice core ice (Swiss hole 1) and Sarah and Vasileios prepared a great barbeque and a birthday cake. Nicolai chose saxophone, guitar and drums.

What we did today:

1. Deep drilling core length: 14.82 m
2. Logging depth: 370.79 m
3. Processing depth: 307.45 m
4. Water isotopes depth: 235.40 m
5. Mounted HT drill and test drilled for firn gas sampling. First sample taken.
6. Started drilling second pilot hole for Swiss RADIX casing using Swiss shallow drill
7. The German intermediate drill has been set up and a first core was drilled
8. Water vapour, methane, aerosols, snow and boundary layer measurements
9. Celebrating Nicolais birthday with barbecue

Ad. 5: The position of the firn gas drilling site is 75.61964°N 035.97673°W (2017)

Weather: Overcast in the morning and clear blue sky after noon. Good outdoor working conditions. Temp. -7°C to - 11°C. At 8 am it was completely calm, but later winds have been up to 10 kt from SW.

FL, Anders Svensson

Multiple ice core drilling sites. Swiss camp in front and German camp in the back.