Iceland and if so a quick pull out would be necessary. After take-off the icefield appears after 5 minutes, then for two hours, nothing but blank white fills one's view. We made it over the divide and were headed down to the southeast when low-lying clouds appeared. To land we needed perfect clear conditions for the pilot to spot and avoid sustrugi. We made it to our destination, the co-pilot looks back and shrugs his shoulders...what to do but turn around and head home? We re-define new coordinates and head further east, hoping for clear weather. 10 minutes later Clement exclaims, "Oh, I see snow!" Indeed. The pilot drew back on the throttle, and spun around. 50..30...10...it was a quick and bumpy landing, we came to a stop.
The co-pilot walked around to open our door, "Welcome to the icesheet." The weather was pretty nice, slight wind, no blowing snow. We unloaded quickly, Jonas wasted no time and soon we were alone. Setting up camp was done efficiently in the good weather.
The Eclipse Drill, weighing 1700 lbs arrived on a second flight four hours later.
After it arrived, we quickly began the setup process, assembling the drill and processing station. A few hours into the setup we hit a catastrophic problem. The drill, provided by an independent company, came missing two critical pieces each about the size of a quarter. Without these pieces the drill is inoperable and thus our primary research goals of obtaining accumulation observations in the southeast would not be attainable. The missing piece was a hinge for an anti-torsion bar. In the photo you can see one parabolic bar hanging below the upper barrel, on the other side, the other bar could not be attached. These bars stick out into the sidewalls of the borehole and prevent the upper-barrel from spinning and force the cutters to rotate into the ice. In the photo you can see we shielded the drill site from the wind with guyed bamboo and tarps. The white boxes are the core boxes.
After an somber dinner, Rick phoned in the news to base (below) and then we received more bad news. The "good weather window" was to end with a large storm in 2 days. We had until then to jury rig a replacement part in the field and drill 150+ feet of core.
That night, the good weather began to degrade. Temps dropped to only about -20F but the winds picked up to a steady 30-40 mph by nightfall. Wind chills around -45. We were well prepared and slept warm, though one thing I did not expect was the constant snowfall inside the tent from vapor deposition on the tent walls. The next morning the winds never settled down. We faced a full day of working in 35+ mph winds.
After several hours of work we built a longer anti-torsion bar by joining two together and then wedged the ends into place under steal pins and secured with steel wire. The fix looked ok but was certainly not up to the precision we would like. In continued howling winds we began to drill, but ran into many problems. The biggest: the jury rigged torsion bar prevented the drill from descending into the hole properly. Cores came out broken or sometimes not at all. We also had problems separating the core at the bottom in the soft snow.
All of these troubles were exacerbated by the weather. I'd frozen pair of goggles and two pair of glacier glasses. My fur ruff was frozen solid. You couldn't set anything on the ground, it would either get blown away or get buried from spin drift in minutes. The spindrift packs in amazingly tight making rock hard snow that permeates everything. Snow filled control panels for the drill and soaked all of the core cards. Clement had no tent to write notes in. He wrote in his notebook barehanded, huddled under his fur ruff. By the end of the day we had collected a piddling 6.5 meters of our 50 m goal. At 7 pm, after being out since 8 am, we staggered into our cook tent, exhausted. All of us just sat in silence for minutes. It was miserable out there. The news from the base was that strong winds were now expected AHEAD of the storm and it would be tight to get us out in time. Our pilot would aim to pick us up as early as possible the next morning. For those of you that worry, we are fully prepared to weather these storms. Working outside in them is a different story.
That night was windier and colder, but I had refined my sleeping methods. I slept very well, others had mixed nights, Terry finally fell asleep at 4 am. The next morning the drifts outside our tent had grown to the point of being problematic. Behind Rick's tent a drift 4 feet high and 200 feet long had form a boundary between Clements and my tent and the rest of camp. Compare the photo below to the photo of camp at sunset the previous night.
That morning was a scramble to get out before the storm. We packed up frantically, but left the tents up incase the pilot was unable to land in the now calmed 25 mph winds. The pilot said the landing was marginal. It took 30 minutes to pack the plane. But due to weight limits we had to leave stuff behind. The winds picked 2 hours after we departed, thus we have not yet been able to return. Sitting at the site is the $500k drill, a tent, fuel, and core boxes. We are closely watching for our next opportunity to retrieve everything else. Unfortunately, the next opportunity my not arise for another month, by which time our drilling engineer must be back in Alaska.
So that leaves us at now. We aim to drive 300 km back to the drill site with the spare parts, redrill the site, cache the ice cores for later pickup and drag the 1700 lbs of drilling equipment back to Raven meanwhile surveying the traverse with GPR. This goal still cannot attain our primary objectives but will get at interested questions regarding compaction, and use of radar for accumulation mapping of the Greenland Icesheet. We have 4 days to prepare.
Ballz. You know if there was a meteorological field experiment going on to study intense storms over greenland that the weather would be perfectly calm. You should've tried to synchronize with something like that.
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