Day 9: Life in the EGRIP camp

Short work update: Today we had many problems in the firn air camp, and could only sample one level instead of the three that we had planned. We did solve some of these problems, which is hopefully good for the next days, but still everyone is rather disappointed…

But I wanted to write today about life in the EGRIP camp

Most of the daily life happens in the main Dome, you may already have seen it on pictures in previous posts, here is another photo:

The ground level of the Dome is primarily the eating area. We have a very nice kitchen and enough chairs and tables in the dining area to seat all of us. Each day one of us is the cook’s assistant and helps preparing two very nice meals for lunch and dinner. Everyone is expected to be on time for lunch (1 pm) and dinner (7 pm) and there is always a nice social sphere. For breakfast there is a self-service buffet where you eat when and what you like. Since people work on different shifts they also come at different times for breakfast, and it is more silent. There is also a seemingly unlimited supply of snacks, in particular chocolate bars chocolate bars and cookies that you can just grab and eat or take with you when you go outside.

A limited resource in the camp is water. There are two different water supplies, one for drinking water and one for process water (bathroom, kitchen). This drinking water is made by melting snow from a special clean area some distance away from the camp that is only used for this purpose. The process water also comes from snow, but not from the clean area. The pistenbully piles up a large mountain of snow in front of the melter that you have to shovel into the melter to fill up the water reservoir.

On the gallery of the first level in the Dome is the wardrobe where we can put our polar clothes when we come in.

On the second floor there is the social room, where people hang out at night or when they have breaks. There are also some desks to work on one side. It is very nice and cosy up there, unfortunately we have been so busy the last days that I did not spend much time there.

On the first floor, there is also a small bathroom, where you can wash yourself, have a shower and pee, but for the “big business” you have to go to the tent outside. The toilet is simply a deep hole in the snow, on top of which the carpenters have built a wooden box with a hole…. The nice thing is the mechanism how you show that you are on the toilet: You put up a red flag outside and people can see that this toilet is busy. When you are finished you lay the flag on the ground and people know that the toilet is free. Quite handy because you do not need to go outside and check at -25–C.

I already mentioned that there are several duties here that everyone has to help with, and there is a week plan where you can see what you have to do when. Tomorrow I will have to take care of the big water melter.

When you have to go for larger distances int he camp, for example to the firn air camp, you can use one of the snow mobiles that are parked in front of the Dome. We usually use the of the snow mobiles for our firn air group, because we work the farthest away from camp. This is a lot of fun! When you have to transport something, material or more people, you take one of the sleds and pull it with the snow mobiles. We usually share who is driving and who is sitting on the sled. For really heavy stuff there are also bigger vehicles, but they are mainly driven by our technician Chris. A lot of cargo (wood, boxes for ice cores, fuel, material boxes, etc) are stored on pallets close to the Dome and the tents.

When the weather is nice and you have to wait for someone, there is a nice outside terrace in front of the Dome. I do not see people there very often… and I only used it on the day of our arrival so far (and mainly for the photo) together with Tobias from Austria (working in Norway).

Lat night we had a spontaneous party, in the “carpenters tent”, also a nice way to spend the evening. Since it is always light here, the colors in the normal (red) tents are always bright red, also late at night, and also in the tent where I sleep.

So much for today, this was a post with many photos, but in this case pictures say more than words and do not need that much explanation. You hopefully have a good idea now on how it looks here above ground, in one of the next days I will show you the underground, where most of the people here actually work.