This morning Thomas Blunier and myself had to get up at 7 to finish packing the pallets for the aircraft, so it was a short night after last night’s party. Then it was waiting, while our drilling team was driving back to the firn air site to drill some more meters. But then, about an…

Today I took the opportunity to collect some snow samples. I want to bring these samples back to Utrecht because Dusan Materic in our group will analyze organic compounds in the snow. So after breakfast I went out together with Tobias and Alexandra to the clean snow area on the west side of the camp…

Last night, midsummer at midnight sun at midnight – a breathtaking view of the EGRIP camp: Our firn air project finished earlier than expected. Today we packed our equipment and cleaned up most of the firn air camp. Only the drill and the logging tent are still there since Johannes and Camilla continue to drill…

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,…

In the firn air camp today we reached a level (about 66 m) where the flow of air got very low. The CO2 concentration indicates that the air is from the 1980s. We managed to fill all the low-volume samples, even we were not able to sample the same amount than at other levels. We…

Yesterday I wrote about how a deep ice core is drilled, and how difficult it is to collect it when you are already more than 1000 m below the surface. Now I want to tell a little bit about what is done with this ice core while it is still here in the camp. Next…

As I wrote before, the main goal of EGRIP is to drill an ice core that is about 2550 m long. We can see in real time on a screen in the main Dome how far the drillers are. At this moment (I have just taken the photo) they have reached 1153.28 m and are…

It is Sunday today, and this means no breakfast, and a brunch at 1 pm, because it turned out to be a long party last night. Only some of us (guess who) were working again relatively early…. Anyway, the Saturday Night Dinner starts at 19:00, but since we had some delays in the firn air…

Today we had a beautiful day on the ice sheet! Fortunately we could fix the leaks on the compressor this morning. We filled many new canisters from 38 and 43 m depth. In terms of depth we are now more than halfway down to the firn-ice transition at about 70 m, but the sampling intervals…

Today was overall a good day for the firn air sampling team. But it ended with a bad surprise (see below) The drilling was very successful, and we managed to drill to and sample air from 3 layers (23, 28 and 33 meters depth). It was a long day as well (started at 7 am,…