We are out of freezer space

The hang auger drill team (Johannes, Todd, and Emily) as seen from Todd’s drone. We now have cores around camp for constraining snow accumulation reconstructions.

The firn gas/shallow core team drilled another two shallow cores with the hand auger.

Over the past three days, we have drilled five shallow cores (about 10 meters long each) to assess the spatial variability in snow accumulation around the main drill site.

The coring locations are located about 800 meters from the main camp in four directions (N, E, S, W) at waypoints used for the initial radar survey, so we have radar data and accumulation estimates at the same points. Each of these cores should record about 10 years of precipitation thereby giving us a good picture of the local geography’s impact on the snow precipitation/accumulation history for the last decade.

We have drilled so many cores now that we are out of freezer space for the ice cores, and we have therefore moved the samples that do not need to be kept at -25°C into the storage trench that we created from one of Johannes’ snow pits last Sunday.

The main drilling passed 300 meters today with 12 good runs producing 23.87 meters of core. This means that we are at least half way to bedrock, and later in the day, we passed another limit: By reaching 304 meters, we are now deeper than what the drilling winch has ever been before. The previous depth record for the winch was the Aurora Basin North drilling, which our team undertook during the 2013/2014 Antarctic field season together with our Australian colleagues. Logged depth 311.1 m.

Weather: Cloudy with some ground fog, so visibility has been low during most of the day. Clearing up from 6 am. During the entire workday we have had temperatures around -13°C. Weak winds mainly from the North.



Best,
Sune O. Rasmussen, RECAP FL