June 20, 2023

Filter runs and a busy day on the surface

The GEUS team doing maintenance of the AWS at the Tunu Site north of EGRIP.


The borehole was filtered today, making it ready for the Swiss dust logger to go down tomorrow. At the surface, the Hungarian team had good progress and finished the second out of four 24 m deep shallow cores before dinner. After dinner the team went out to start the third core… those guys are unstoppable, or they just checked the weather forecast that does not look great for the coming days. Best to take advantage of the nice weather while it is here, as it is no fun or even impossible to drill from surface in windy conditions. A bit further to the south a 2 m ’Korean’ snow pit was carefully sampled by Jinhwa and Alison using astronaut suits to avoid any contamination of the extremely low trace element levels they are sampling.
The Nordland 6 Twin-Otter went out with the GEUS team and Nico to do maintenance of an AWS at the Tunu site some 250 km north of camp. This is the site where Joe McConnell and colleagues drilled an ice core last summer using EGRIP as a hub. Correction to yesterday’s text: Since the production of Twin-Otters started in 1965, the plane probably did not participate in the Korea war after all… the bullet holes must originate from some other war, then. Also, it may be confusing that the Icelandic owned plane has Air Greenland colors, but with skis mounted up here on the ice, the red color makes a great appearance.

What we did today:

  1. Filtered borehole in two runs.
  2. No drilling and no processing.
  3. Nordlandair 6 went out to check Tunu AWS.
  4. Shallow drilling at Hungarian ‘tritium peak’ site.
  5. Sampled Korean pit 3 km south of camp.
  6. Groomed skiway.

Weather today: Another good day for flying and outdoor work. Blue sky, temperatures -10°C to -22°C, and wind 6-10 kt from SW.

FL, Anders Svensson

All precautions were taken for the trace sampling of the 2m Korean snow pit.

Usually, we have flags for all participating nationalities at the camp flag line. It was realized however that we were missing a Bosnian flag in camp as our doctor Aira is of Bosnian origin. Meg Harlan helped us out by promptly sewing together the national flag of Bosnia and Herzegovina from other flags no longer in use. Here Meg and Aira are posing with the flag.