Though the winds largely subsided after the first night, the marginal weather continued for the next week. The entire valley is coated with probably a foot of new snow, falling gradually or fiercely or not at all this past week. It was a bit of unfortunate timing, as we only had about a days’ work on the glacier remaining to finish up our ‘winter’ measurements, but there was little point in trying to do this given the conditions. I used the opportunity to make a bunch of phone calls to help set up other aspects of the project later in summer, as well as settle the minor crises on other projects that inevitably come up in a prolonged absence. Jason sorted through all of the mass balance and surveying data from the past month, doing quality control and figuring out what minor gaps still remain. Kristin and Turner played several thousand iterations of ‘dinosaur’ in the ‘green tent’, gradually going stir crazy.




Turner provides the only color in an otherwise monochromatic landscape.

Great progress was being made by the drill team, however, despite the weather. By today they had reached over 190 meters depth, at a location which is likely no more than 210 meters deep. Their schedule had been kind of crazy given the weather and drilling conditions, but now were mostly on a day schedule. The ice had warmed to about the pressure melting point by this point, about -0.1C, and the best drilling approach seemed to be to keep everything warm to prevent freezing by drilling during the day.


Bella and Terry keep the drill going down despite the weather.


Darek analyzes the ice as Dyo waits for him to finish so he can measure its temperature.


Darek’s photography table for thin sections and core chunks. The tape around the edges provides accurate scale, and he has arranged all of the photos in a spreadsheet so that we can later track changes in bubble morphology or other visual features with depth.

This morning there seemed to be a break in the weather, so Jason and I scrambled to prepare for a day on the glacier, finishing the remaining surveying and mass balance tasks and getting equipment in place for summer. Unfortunately by the time we were ready to go, by lunch time, the weather had deteriotated again. We got down as far as our second camp in the ablation area, but by then there was zero visibility and fairly heavy snowfall. We sorted a few things there and tried dragging a load of miscellaneous gear still left-over from our last move, but the trail conditions were awful, with the new snow hiding the zero-friction ice just beneath it and causing the snowmachine to get stuck repeatedly.

About this time, the drill crew announced that they had hit liquid water in the hole and that the mechanical drill was starting to get stuck. Probably what was going on was that the colder ice at its depressed pressure-melting point of -0.1C or so was trying to suck energy from the liquid water in the hole, with the standard freezing point of 0C, and so the hole was closing by re-freezing. We headed up there with the last thermistor string, just in case this spelled the end of drilling, but by the time we got there the thermal drill was attached and making further progress, only a meter or two away from 200 meters depth. So it seems likely that it will only be a day or two before we hit bottom or the drill hits something it cant penetrate, and time to draw the drilling part of the project to a close.