Time to prepare for packing down camp

With the change of time zone we have some time off and there is time for other activities. Here Steff is practicing ice fishing.

Today some more attempts were made of drilling into the bedrock material with the rock drill. 700g of frozen glycol was dumped in the borehole in order to dissolve ice and chips in the deepest part that appear to block the pump. Although the drill appeared to be drilling and there was a hard pull to recover the drill, unfortunately, no core was retrieved. There will be no more attempts of drilling into bedrock. Tomorrow part of the borehole will be temperature logged, and then it is time to start packing down camp!

Over the last couple of weeks Jakob has attempted to deploy a newly developed fast access drill in one of the 75m deep boreholes that were drilled for firn gas sampling about a month ago. Unfortunately, the casing tube that is frozen into the bottom of the borehole was collapsed when it froze in making it impossible to drill into the ice. This was discovered when the tube was brought to surface today. The drill had almost made its way out of the casing tube, but unfortunately it did not succeed. Today Jakob started investigating the second firn gas borehole to see if a second attempt of deploying the drill can be made.

A 4.5 m horizontal ice core (A107) taken from ‘Italian pit’ at 1.1 m depth for investigating horizontal variability of the firn. Oil change of generators was made in the morning. Today we are 6 hours off set from East Greenland time. Tomorrow we should be back to normal.

Weather: Mostly overcast, some snowfall and ground fog during the night. Temperatures -4°C to -8°C, wind 0-3 m/s from E.

Renland FL, Anders