Drilling progress slowed substantially from the breakneck speed of the previous days. The transition to thermal drill was also a transition to day-time drilling, requiring some time to adjust to the new schedule. But the thermal drill, unfortunately, seemed cranky at being redeployed, only making it another 30 centimeters yesterday before it refused to go deeper. This morning we ran the camera down the hole to see what the objection was. Though it was a little murky down there due to adding some ethanol and it mixing with the motor and cuttings, etc, it was clear that there was at least a small rock there, and that’s all it would take to stop thermal drill. So the plan today was to go back to the mechanical drill, this time during the day, taking advantage the heat of the day to keep the slushy cuttings of warm ice from freezing the core barrel, opposite of the approach used previously—basically the idea is to keep everything frozen or keep everything thawed, but not to transition between them.

The ice had been getting progressively warmer with depth, but so far we haven’t hit any water. Based on nearly all the studies on ice motion and dynamics we’ve done here, we expected the bottom of the ice to be at the melting point, as this is what would allow for basal sliding to occur, facilitated by the presence of liquid water under high pressure. So the fact we haven’t hit water yet seems odd, though the ice temperature seems to be at or near the pressure melting point. Perhaps we’re drilling off the center of the valley bottom, or perhaps we’re too far down valley, or perhaps the water only exists in isolated pockets. In any case, we haven’t seen any liquid water yet or hit any conduit systems full of pressurized water like I would have expected at this location.

Jason and I spent the day trying to organize some of our caches. Dealing with gear has become a major chore, exacerbated by all of the camp moves. Today we moved the ice we are saving from our current hole (only about 10 cm every 2 m or so) up to the freezer. Even this turned out to be quite a chore, as the fresh snow substantially reduced traction up the steep hill. Jason spent more than hour get stuck and unstuck trying to get the ice up, while I organized some things at our Beaver cache and took a few photos. It started out a crystal clear day, but quickly turned cloudy, though allowing for pretty lighting effects. We organized a few more things at the upper cirque cache, then Jason dealt with some GPS issues at our moraine camp base station. It seemed like nothing we had planned should have taken as long as it did, but it did, and productivity levels are only a fraction of what they have been in the past, due to a variety of issues.


I had hoped to take a high resolution panorama from here, but the fast moving clouds and highly variable surface lighting only allowed for low resolution ones. (Click on the panorama and drag to look around, press Shift to zoom in, Command (Mac) or Control (PC) to zoom out.) Enlarge this panorama

We returned shortly before dinner time, as Kristin and Turner were skiing back down from the Beaver cached with more food supplies, and I was surprised to hear the generator still running for the drill. Apparently great progress had been made during the day, with the mechanical drill penetrating beyond the limit of the thermal drill by another 10 meters or so. More small rocks were coming up, but during the heat of the day the slushy cutting were staying slushy and not freezing within the drill, allowing progress to continue until evening, when air temperatures dropped and freezing started occurring again.


Kristin goes shopping at the Beaver cache, in the freezer section, while Turner plays in the shopping cart.