Day 12: Saturday Night Party

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 camp earlier, the last high pressure sample was slightly late. It meant that Thomas and myself had to go out there in our nice dinner clothes, in jacket and tie, to finish the last sample cylinder and close the firn camp for the night ?.

When we came back, everyone was already seated and we had missed the appetizer.

We had a delicious dinner prepared by Kerim (fish), Nikol (Greek dish), Erik (salad) and two deserts prepared by Camilla (cake) and Maddalena (Tiramisu). Anders, the Field manager, served several rounds of different drinks from many parts of the world.

After dinner some tables and chairs were removed to create a dancefloor and the party started. It started with a few dancers

while others were playing table football or chatting

but after midnight

more and more moved to the dance floor and the party got wilder and wilder

I went to bed around 2 am, and in the morning it was even more silent than usual in the Dome.

Short work update: The firn drilling team decided to start drilling and sampling air around 10:30. In the late morning we spent some time on modifications of the sampling system and this way managed to speed up the big compressor. Hopefully the high pressure canister sampling will go a bit faster in the next days. At 5 pm we decided that we would drill to another level starting at 6, and we just finished with the sampling around 11 pm.

We have now finished 11 out of 20 sampling levels finished, and we crossed the 50 m depth today (last level was at 51.80 m). We see every day that CO2 decreases as we go down further into the firn, which shows that the air is getting older. But in the first 50 m this goes very slowly, and the air is still not very old yet (looks like less than 10 years). We expect that from the next level on the air will get older more quickly, and therefore we will sample at smaller intervals.

In the last days, I have also visited the main drilling and science trench of the EGRIP camp underground, and if time allows I will write tomorrow how the deep ice core is drilled and what people do with the ice core here. It is quite spectacular….