Day 6: Preparation of the firn air site

This will be a very short blog, since I am very tired.

I did not sleep very well the first night, and got up at 6:15, and we have worked very hard physically the entire day to set up the firn air site. In the beginning it was a lot of fun, but it became quite exhausting at the end (and we also had and still have quite some problems with power). In addition to the exhaustive work in at the firn site, I had dish-washing duty today, which means that I had to do the dishes after breakfast, lunch and dinner….

In the morning, we first set up two tents, one for the firn air sampling and one for the ice core processing. I had thought that we had almost everything transported to the site already, but we still had to go several times to the main camp to get more stuff. We then moved a lot of our material  into the tents, and unpacked the boxes. We set up most of the machines in the firn air tent, connected everything, so that this part is now ready to be tested and used (as soon as we get power).

Then we dug a snow pit, the so-called “trench” where we hopefully will start drilling tomorrow. The snow blocks that we dug out were used to make a protecting wall.

We put together the bladder, which will be lowered from a big tri-pod into the drill hole. The firn air site is getting in shape.

So far, so good, but the biggest problem is the power. We got a generator placed about 125 m away from our site (the small light-green square in the background of the picture (top-middle), but there do not seem to be enough power cables left here anymore to make the connection. We drove back and forth to the main camp several times, but in the end still do not have power. We may need to move the generator tomorrow to be able to use the cable that we have now. Because, of course, without power we can do nothing. Finally the shallow (but still big and very heavy) drill also arrived and we moved it on a sledge to the right point. I will send a photo of the full setup and more details tomorrow.