Little Dome C - Beyond EPICA Oldest Ice Drilling Site (75.29917 °S, 122.44516 °E) – Season 2023/24
Situation Report #37, 2 January 2024
Lemmi fine-tuning the horizontal saw. Photo: J. Westhoff. Credit: Westhoff©PNRA/IPEV
Stable water isotopes comparing the EPICA and the Beyond EPICA core. We are close to 100 000 years today (from A. Landais)
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), Tamara Gerber (UCPH), Iben Koldtoft (UCPH), Julien Westhoff (UCPH), James Veale (BAS), Fortunat Joos (UNIB), and Inès Gay (IPEV)
Personnel @Concordia: Michaela Mühl (UNIB), Federico Scoto (CNR)
Weather at LDC 1 pm: sunny and windy, T = -17°C, Wind = 3.5 m/s
The restart after the New Year's Day break was a little complicated. On the drilling side, the first run had a too low pitch and was therefore slow, followed by troubles with changing the drill head. After this change of head, we were back in a more stable coring mode, enabling us once again to obtain cores over four meters long.
In the scientific trench, we had a few problems with the horizontal saw (which had to be fine-tuned) and with the DEP, whose computer chose to stay in holiday mode. Both issues are fixed and processing is up to speed with drilling.
What we did today at LDC:
- drilled in shift;
- processed 25 ice cores and caught up with drilling;
- did some BAS geophysical measurements on the way to Concordia.
End of day statistics at 19h30:
- Driller’s depth: 1379.16 m;
- we made 5 runs between 8h and 19h30 today. The length of the cores was: 2.22, 4.3, 3.61, 4.45, and 4.4 (driller length), for a total of 18.98 meters.
- Logger’s depth:1380.64 m
- Current processing depth: 1361 m; daily total: 25 m; season total: 1035 m.
Olivier Alemany, Matthias Hüther, Julien Westhoff and Saverio Panichi. LDC, 02.01.2024