The team made it to Raven - April 5th

The team had an on time departure from Kanger to Raven.  Clem stated their schedule for today is as follows:


Put in at Raven
Set up camp, have some water going
break down pallets
organize sleds
set up gps base station
set up hitches with springs on the sleds
leave pallets+ flags for Raven crew

If they need to stay extra day at Raven because it takes too much time accomplish those tasks, the schedule for tomorrow or in 2 days:

Break down camp
Organize sleds
Departure for 80km toward east following line.
Set up camp


___________________


This is Annie writing now - I'll update as often as I get reports from the field.  Good luck guys!!

Arctic Circle Traverse 2011 to Begin Tomorrow!

It has been a productive two days in Kangerlussuaq! Yesterday we succeeded in getting a single twin otter flight into our ACT11-B site. This flight cached the majority of the core boxes needed to drill our three cores. However the pilots found the ice surface to be extremely rough and were only able to put down about 4 km from our barrel cache. Today, we had planned a second twin otter cache flight but unfortunately a storm has closed in on the southeast and a landing was not possible. We have managed, however to get the remaining equipment onto herc pallets and we plan to traverse with all remaining gear. The herc arrived today and we are planning a departure around 2pm local time tomorrow! The weather looks good, and we are hopeful that we will be able to get in.

From now on out we will have no email contact and will update the blog though Annie via satellite phone whenever possible. Tomorrow we hope to enable the real-time satellite tracker which will post our location on this website: http://www.datatransport.org/act/monitor. The website will post our location, elevation and speed every minute in real-time! So this is a good way to keep track of our progress. Wish us luck!

Evan

April 2nd in Kanger

Another productive day in the warehouse leaves the ACT2011 team nearly
ready for departure!  We are feeling extremely well organized this
year.  Our twin otter operated by Nordland Air has arrived.  I met the
pilots today.  Our first attempt to cache the core boxes at ACT2011-C
(see map on old post) will be tomorrow 10am.  Weather odds are unknown
though good today.  Ground surface in the SE looks rough.  We will aim
to get as many core boxes into C as possible on the first flight.  The
pilots do not require our help on these flights.

Some satellite communications are still enroute.  The real-time
satellite locator beacon will arrive on Monday.  All of these items
will be off loaded from a Herc ASAP and we will have the evening on
the 4th to insure all is operational before our first potential putin
to Raven on the 5th.

Clem/Brian have been working on connecting the Trimble or a nav GPS to
the radar to simplify the GPR post-processing.  They have had limited
success, Clem will keep trying as time allows but our current plan is
to connect the Nav GPS to the GPR which will give us only limited
benefits over the original system.

The auroras were awesome last night!!!

Evan

    Radar sled looking good.

April 1st in Kanger

Today has been a good day, lots of progress in terms of packing and traverse organization. Both GPS base stations has been tested, gear for traverse have been weighted, and food has been organized.

A TO from Iceland is supposed to arrive tomorrow, at 2pm, hopefully we can have the 2 flights to C before we leave for traverse, if not, we will start investigating other options. We spent our evening cutting lay flats (180 pieces this year) and we had a huge present 20 minutes ago, auroras were showing up with this clear night. It’s beautiful! Thanks Greenland for this surprise!

First full day in Kanger

Our first day in Kangerlussaq has been very productive.  We are

completely ready for the twin otter flights scheduled to start on

Saturday, weather permitting, of course.  The twin otter flights will

cache remaining equipment before the traverse begins.  Tomorrow we

will continue preparing for traverse.  Today we packed and palleted

all 27 core boxes.  We prepared the drill for caching in the field.

Tomorrow, we will finish traverse inventory.  Clement and Evan will

work on radar setup, Clement will work on integrating GPS and GPR.

Brian/Terry/Evan will work on food preparations, and misc traverse

prep.  We will talk with Nordland Air pilots in the afternoon, and get

a weather update for the cache flight tomorrow morning.

 

Update from Clem upon arriving in Kangerlussuaq

The crew made it to Kanger!

Clem wrote:

We woke up at 4:30 am to take the military bus at 5am up to Scotia, at the National Air guard.  The plane was scheduled to take off at 8am and that’s what happened. Right on time! We flew up to Goose bay in 3 hours, had a short ice cream break over there, and then went back on the plane for 3 more hours to get to Kangerlussuaq. We arrived at 5:30pm local time; it is still winter here, snow on the road, snow on black ridge, Greenlandic driving snow machines around and pretty cold temperature around 0F. It feels great to be back in Kanger!

Good news about the lunch/dinner situation, this year CPS crew has greatly improved their system.  Last  year the ACT crew only had one dining option, which was primarily Danish cuisine complete with lots of Muskox. This year, they have the choice between the pizza Rio, the Polar bear (Thai food) or La Cantina.

Thursday schedule:

-          Break down pallet with science + personal gear (Team)
-          Check, Inventory depot from ACT-10+ identify missing items (Clem+Evan)
-          Get 27 core boxes ready (4” tubes,  black straps, foam) to go on the TO flight (Team)
-          Identify drill part able to go on TO flight with core boxes (Terry)
-          Sharing food in half, so it is ready to be ship if possible on the TO (Team)
-          Localize and identify GPS  + solar panels from UNAVCO, test gear (Clem)
-          Work on allocation list for camping gear, identify missing objects, test stoves and other gear…(Brian + Evan)

More thorough report at: http://bprc.osu.edu/wiki/30_April%2C_2011

Arctic Circle Traverse 2011

This year we aim to traverse from Raven Base towards the east coast just south of Helheim Glacier. The traverse will be about 700km. We will drill three 50 m long cores ACT11-A,B,C and a 300 m core at Raven in cooperation with GLISN (http://glisn.info/).
As we approach the coast we expect accumulation rates to increase to a point and then decrease rapidly as increasingly harsh katabatic winds sublimate accumulated snow. At about 1500m, ACT11-A will be the lowest elevation core ever drilled on the Greenland Ice Sheet.