Today the team of deep and shallow drillers went out to the PFAS shallow drilling site to recover the stuck DK shallow drill. This endeavor was a highly successful and coordinated team effort involving warm glycol in a drum, a firehose, a borehole camera and some patience. After a couple of hours, the drill was successfully recovered to surface! The warm glycol with 20% water added was dumped into the borehole in a controlled and monitored manner through the fire hose. By monitoring the glycol level on top of the drill it was avoided that the glycol spilled into the firn and it was managed to remove an eight-meter drift-snow layer above the drill and to melt the drill out of its stuck position. The shallow drill is the key instrument for carrying out the ICELINK associated project and it of course super critical not to lose the drill in a borehole. Today’s rescue operation was therefore awaited with some excitement, and we were all very relieved about the positive outcome.
At the deep drilling site, the drill team mounted the full ice-core drill (excluding the drill head), with a 2.2 m core barrel and a total length of approx. 7 meters. Lowering the drill down the hole was not successful as the dill could not pass the kink in the casing at 13.8m depth. Julien and Chantal continued the optically stimulated luminescence experiments, which first required digging out the more than two-meter-deep pit, which had drifted in during the high winds of the last days. In the mega trench, HC and Sonja continued the meticulous mapping of the snow stratigraphy. Also in the clean snow area, Nora and colleagues set up a new snow and firn temperature monitoring instrument. This ‘snow-harp’ will slowly be buried in the snow and continuously report on the developing temperature depth profile helping to disentangle the mysteries of Greenland ice sheet.
What we did this Monday:
- The DK shallow drill was rescued from 30 m depth
- Maintenance of DK shallow drill initiated
- Attempted to lower full short-version of main drill into casing
- Magnus beam groomed the skiway
- The mega trench was sampled by HC and Sonja
- Set up a novel snow temperature sampling device
- Worked on opening large storage trench
- Set up WIFI communication in the WP area
- Started preparing winter cargo line
Ad. 4. Position of the surface team Nora device N 72.57473 W 37.64603 deg
Weather: During the day we had overcast and winds up to 20 kt from E, but during the day the wind decreased and the sun appeared. Temperatures -10C to -20C.
FL, Anders Svensson
