Little Dome C - Beyond EPICA Oldest Ice Drilling Site (75.29917 °S, 122.44516 °E) – Season 2023/24
Situation Report #24, 20 December 2023
James, doing the BAS geophysical survey. Photo: J. Veale. Credit: Veale©PNRA/IPEV
Inès shoveling snow to fill the snow melter. Photo: J. Westhoff. Credit: Westhoff©PNRA/IPEV
The processing team celebrating the end of the process of the ice drilled last year. Photo: F. Scoto. Credit: Scoto©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 = -18.9°C, Wind = 4.8 m/s
Today was very similar to yesterday or the day before. 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. Despite the increase in depth, we continue to make 9 runs a day, probably because we are more efficient on the surface during the corer cleaning phases.
We are preparing approx. 40 boxes of processed core to be transported to Concordia tomorrow. It's very likely that we will finally receive the second sanitary/shower module we've been waiting for.
What we did today at LDC:
- we continued to drill in shifts;
- we have had to clean the pig pipes which were frozen;
- we now finished processing all the ice from last season (222m to 608m and 609 to 806m, which was processed before);
- additionally, we reached a new processing record of 57 m in one day;
- we continued drilling with the IGE’s dry shallow drill;
- we continued BAS geophysical survey side project.
End of day statistics at 19h30:
- Driller’s depth: 1096.79 m;
- in between 19h30 yesterday and today 19h30 we made 9 runs (drillers delta depth: 4.5, 4.5, 4.54, 4.4, 4.41, 4.43, 4.41, 4.44 and 4.49) for a total length of 40.12 meters (drillers delta depth);
- Logger’s depth: 1098.99 m
- Current processing depth: 608 m; daily total: 57 m; season total: 586 m.
Olivier Alemany, Matthias Hüther, Julien Westhoff and Saverio Panichi. LDC, 20.12.2023