Progress continues to be made, but mild storms have slowed things down. The winds aren’t as strong as our first big storms, but they are strong enough that it makes drilling and logging more difficult than its worth. We began placing bets as to how thick the ice was here, but everyone lost the first round, fooled by the presence of water so early on. Now the bets lay in the 130-155m range.


Bella demonstrating her technique for removing slush from the drill cable. Note the difference in apparent thickness of the cable above and below her gloves.


This is really clear ice, as demonstrated by Ryo and his ruler.

I spent most of the day trying to sort out an internet connection for us. I had hoped to piggy-back on the telemetry system we maintain for our weather stations, but there were a few issues we had yet to resolve in Fairbanks to accomplish this. So I worked with our satellite phone system. I was able to make a connection, but it was frustratingly slow. With connect times typically only last 5 minutes, and working at 9600 baud, you could barely log into a webmail system before you had to start over again and it took about 3 hours to send a short email.