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 we're back to where we left off yesterday. We continued processing last year's core (and in the meantime, repairing a part of the horizontal saw, and further insulated the entrance to the scientific trench - the one opposite the drill tent).

After another unsuccessful run without penetration, we tried mounting a slightly more aggressive drill head. Unfortunately, here again we failed to drill. At surface, we found a few chunks of ice in the drill, suggesting that there were others at the bottom of the hole, which would have been the source of our penetration problems. So, we decided to set up "Arnold" to clean the bottom of the hole. Unfortunatly, while running this cleaning run, we break the three small plastic pieces at the bottom of the spiral on the core barrel. We prepared everything tonight in order to fish these pieces tomorrow morning.