As we returned from the wier late the night before, the drill team was waking up and preparing for a night of drilling. With the delays caused by hitting a rock and having to start a new hole, we were feeling the time pressure of completing the 3 holes that we planned (I had already dropped a fourth hole planned in my initial proposal). If we were to hit a rock on this 2nd attempt, there would be little chance to start a 3rd attempt and complete the final hole, which was over 200 meters deep. So at this point, there seemed to be no certainty that we would even complete 2 of the planned holes. Initially I had proposed using a hot water drill for these holes, which takes only a day or so to make a hole, so we began revisiting that option and checked whether such a drill could be flown up here in time, but it did not seem likely, so we resigned ourselves to keeping our fingers crossed.


Ryo measures ice temperature of the core by inserting a thermistor into a hole drilled by a cordless drill.

By using some different tools and techniques, however, the drill team was able to core more than 50 meters in one night. Without the need to keep the cores pretty, they were able to drill faster using more brutal cutting tools. Apparently they had a store of older cutters which were considered more expendable, and these needed to be changed out several times through the course of the night as they got dulled by small rocks and grit. But by the end of the shift, we were nearly down the same spot as we got stopped on the first attempt, so by tomorrow we should know whether we’ll break on through to the other side.


Darek plots the ice temperature data on his computer while Turner tries to figure out how to delete it before the file gets saved.