New people in camp

Early morning at RECAP. The sun has not set in weeks, but at night, the low sun is not strong enough to prevent fog from forming. Visibility often drops to less than 100 meters, and the camp becomes eerie The fog usually burns off before 9 am. The mast blocking the sun is the Iridium antenna that provides phone and data communications.

We had hoped to get the first flight with departure Thursday afternoon from Constable Point, but the weather did not cooperate, and at 1 pm (i.e., 1 am Friday at RECAP), the flight was cancelled.

Due to preparations for the flight, a lot of the team had less sleep than usual, and we therefore took a slow day. Some team members are still working on the RECAP reversed-day schedule, while others are starting to adapt to Constable Point time or simply sleep when the tasks allow. So meal times are a little confusing these days: different people may regard the same meal as breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

Friday at 9 am the conditions were good both at RECAP and in Constable Point, and the Bassler completed the first of our resupply missions, bringing new team members, food, and spare parts and taking out ice samples and equipment not needed any more.

During the early morning hours of Saturday (2:30 pm coastal time), we received the second flight bringing drill liquid and taking out ice core boxes so we now have plenty of freezer space.

The drill team made 9 runs today, producing 17.73 meters of core. The core is getting increasingly brittle due to the high pressure in the ice: At the current depth, the pressure is almost 30 atmospheres in the ice and 23 atmospheres in the hole due to the presence of the drilling liquid.

The high pressure means that the ice sometimes cracks when it is being cut, which is frustrating but also an inevitable part of a project like this, where we do not have time or facilities to store the ice before cutting it. Logged depth 352.46 m (yesterday 334.73 m – sorry for the error in yesterday’s daily report).

Weather: During the work”day” cold (-16°C) and humid (85% relative humidity) with fog and almost no wind. From 6 am we started to be able to see the blue sky above us through the fog, and by 9 am we had fine conditions for receiving flights.