Little Dome C - Beyond EPICA Oldest Ice Drilling Site (75.29917 °S, 122.44516 °E) – Season 2023/24
Situation Report #22, 18 December 2023
Testing the F2G/IGE shallow drill. Photo: O. Alemany. Credit: Alemany©PNRA/IPEV
Celebrating 1000 meters of ice core. Photo J. Westhoff. Credit: Westhoff©PNRA/IPEV
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)
Weather at LDC 5 pm: sunny and nice, T = -18°C, Wind = 1.8 m/s
Today we passed the 1,000-meters mark for both drillers and loggers. We're continuing our shift work on drilling, logging, and processing last year's core. In terms of drilling we are still using the same set up and are still getting ice cores around 4.5 meters in every run of excellent quality.
What we did today at LDC:
- we continued to drill in shifts;
- we are now processing the ice from 222m to 608m, which is left unprocessed from last year. We finished another 49 m in shifts, reaching 500m depth;
- we started to receive the first water isotope results from Concordia;
- we are drilling with the IGE’s dry shallow drill to test it;
- we continued BAS geophysical survey side project.
End of day statistics at 19h30:
- Driller’s depth: 1016.28 m;
- in between 19h30 yesterday and today 19h30 we made 9 runs (drillers delta depth: 4.51, 4.50, 4.57, 4.38, 4.47, 4.49, 4.53, 4.49 and 4.45) for a total length of 40.39 meters (drillers delta depth);
- Logger’s depth: 1018.58 m
- Current processing depth: 500 m; daily total: 49 m; season total: 478 m.
Olivier Alemany, Matthias Hüther, Julien Westhoff and Saverio Panichi. LDC, 18.12.2023