Little Dome C - Beyond EPICA Oldest Ice Drilling Site (75.29917 °S, 122.44516 °E) – Season 2023/24
Situation Report #45, 10 January 2024
Removing the poulie cover to allow the cable to get through. 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), Fortunat Joos (UNIB), Michaela Mühl (UNIB), and Inès Gay (IPEV)
Weather at LDC 1 pm: sunny, T = -18.8°C, Wind = 0.5 m/s
After a few good runs, we get a problem while drilling. On the way up we saw that there were knots in the cable. It's likely that the cable had slackened as it descended into the borehole. We unwound the cable along the length that was damaged, cut off the damaged part (around 450 metres) and are now in the process of re-anchoring it so that we can resume drilling as soon as possible.
Processing is going well and another 31m have been analyzed and made ready for shipment to Europe.
19 core boxes have been transported this morning to Concordia, and have been loaded for a cold flight to MZS.
What we did today at LDC:
- drilled in shift;
- cut 450 meters of cable in;
- processed 31 ice cores;
- two filtering runs tonight.
End of day statistics at 19h30:
- Driller’s depth: 1626.82 m;
- we made 5 drilling runs and two filtering runs between yesterday 19h30 and 19h30 today. The length of the cores was: 4.55, 4.52, 4.5, 4.35 and 4.43 (driller length), for a total of 22,31 meters.
- Logger’s depth:1627.43 m.
- Current processing depth: 1547 m; daily total: 31 m; season total: 1253 m.
Olivier Alemany, Matthias Hüther, Julien Westhoff and Saverio Panichi. LDC, 10.01.2024