Little Dome C - Beyond EPICA Oldest Ice Drilling Site (75.29917 °S, 122.44516 °E) – Season 2023/24

Personnel @LDC: Saverio Panichi (ENEA, Camp Leader), Olivier Alemany (CNRS), Philippe Possenti (CNRS), Matthias Hüther (AWI), Remi Dallmayr (AWI), Gunther Lawer (AWI), Johannes Lemburg (AWI), Andrea Ceinini (ENEA), Federico Scoto (CNR), Tamara Gerber (UCPH), Iben Koldtoft (UCPH), Julien Westhoff (UCPH), James Veale (BAS), Michaela Mühl (UNIB), Fortunat Joos (UNIB), and Inès Gay (IPEV)

Today's main event was a visit to our little dome c site by an IPEV and PNRA delegation from Concordia: Nathalie Metzler (Deputy Director of IPEV), Olivier Poivre d'Arvor (Ambassador for the Poles) and Thomas Pesquet (French Spacionaute). We were honored to show them around our camp and introduce them to the Beyond EPICA project. We all shared an excellent meal prepared by Saverio, our camp manager.

Apart from the visit, we continued our work on processing ice cores from last year, and continued to try our hand at coring. Indeed, after our two runs yesterday, we were confronted with a problem of the corer's descent between 800 and 805 meters depth. After a few attempts, we decided to ream this section. We were then able to get through the tight section again. Despite this, the drilling is still unstable, the motor's lack of torque is penalizing us, and either we can't hook the ice and start the run, or, if we try to put a little more weight on the drill head, we block the motor due to the lack of torque.

We're preparing a new drill head with a slightly more aggressive geometry, to try and overcome this problem tomorrow.