Day 16: Midsummer on the ice sheet, concert hall and end of firn drilling

A very eventful day at the EGRIP camp today.

After a few days of relatively strong winds and a lot of snow drift, the wind calmed down today, and in the evening sun, just after dinner, the ice sheet looked like a frozen lake, beautiful!!After dinner we had a special evening celebration of midsummer. First, we had a Glühwein in the “concert hall”. Next week a group of musicians will come here and give an Ice Music concert on instruments made of ice.  And over the past weeks some of the people here have been quite busy preparing a concert hall. It is really a cool place, below the ground, like so many other places here. You can imagine that it will be a great concert next week (which I will unfortunately miss ?).

But there was another highlight of the day: Since Midsummer is celebrated in Denmark with bonfires, we had a small bonfire on the ice sheet! Very special in this setting! What about work today?

Before all that happened, we had another intensive day at the firn air camp and finished the firn air sampling! After drilling another meter deeper this morning we were not able to get a sufficiently high flow out of the firn. So this was the end of the firn air pumping, and the only thing we had left to do was to take the surface samples. We had some canisters extra because we could only sample one level less than expected, so we spent most of the day with surface sampling. For that, we put the bladder simply on the surface, and covered it with snow. So we collected the samples via the long lines to make sure that they are taken exactly as the other samples. When the last air sample had been collected, we celebrated with a French Cointreau that Kevin had brought

Then we started packing already and transported some material already back to camp. On the first trip, Thomas and I lost our sledge….

On the second transport I didn’t want to loose material again….

We also managed to get quite a nice thin slice of the firn and took a photograph, you can clearly see the bubbles, and  in this case, that they are still connected via small channels.