Day 11: A beautiful day on the ice sheet – and Saturday night dinner preparations

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 will get smaller further down as the air will get rapidly older in the last 15 m or so. Since we have reached a depth now when we always have to fill all 9 different canisters (sometimes even 10 or 11 since some institutes ask for duplicates, the sampling takes more time now, in total we need a bit more than 6 hours per level. But we are proceeding according to plan (or even a little bit ahead) now. It is nice to see that the first boxes with samples are actually full already (the one that I am sitting on).

As you see, the weather was beautiful, and here two more impressions from the firn air camp, one of the showing the long tubing that we always insert into the hole.

In the past two days we had some visitors, three kite skiers from Norway that have traveled a route of Norwegian explorers form the beginning of the 20th century again. They went from the Northwest side to a point ( I have forgotten the name) in the very far North where only 4 expeditions have ever been before them. Then they are coming back now from the very Norther tip of Greenland to the Southern part, on skis, pulled by the wind with their kites. They left this morning, and here some photographs of their departure.

In addition, we had some other visitors in the last days: Two geese that stayed close to the camp.

And, now, people have stopped working early (except for us who still have to make a short trip to the firn camp to finish the last sample) and are getting dressed up for the Saturday Night Dinner. Kerim, Camilla, Damiano and Maddalena have prepared a special dinner, since our cook Kevin is free on saturday night. The dinner tables are set nicely and the dinner and party will soon begin. I am curious what will happen and will write about this tomorrow.