Today, the Basler went out to Site A, some 250 km SSE of GRIP, to drill the last of the three ICELINK extension cores. Departure at 07:20 in the morning, drilling the entire day and return to GRIP just before dinner with both drill, ice core and personnel. Very efficient! During the day weather at GRIP was quite marginal with low clouds, snow drift and poor visibility, but just before the plane returned to camp, it cleared up. Tomorrow, the Basler will make a cargo shuttle to SFJ with ice cores and equipment. After lunch, most of camp helped out to carry all kinds of gear out of the wind and into the newly opened impressive winter storage trench. There was also packing and documentation of cargo to be shipped out of camp tomorrow.
Driller’s report: ‘Today we had several attempts to further penetrate, again using a hole saw, in different sizes, the Kovacs auger, and the concrete bit. None of these resulted in progress. A video with the downhole GoPro leads to the assumption, that we are trying to cut away a piece of casing, which is sticking upwards and is still attached to the full casing piece, greatly limiting our penetration progress. We also mounted our other motor section and are running several tests on it now, while continuing downhole operations.’
What we did this Monday:
- Fought the broken casing with various tools
- Went to Site A and drilled a 40.47 m shallow core
- Made cook’s freezer inventory
- Moved equipment into main storage trench
- Prepared cargo for tomorrows Basler shuttle to SFJ
- Extended mega trench to almost 5 m depth
- Main generator check
Ad. 2: Position of Site A borehole: N 70.630446 W 35.811779 Elev: 3092 m. This is about 2.3 km to the SE of the new AWS that was set up earlier this season.
Weather: During midday wind picked up to 20 kt and snow started to drift around, but later it calmed to 5 kt. The wind was straight from the N along the skiway. Temp -16C to -8C.
FL, Anders Svensson
