Little Dome C - Beyond EPICA Drilling Site (75.29917 degS, 122.44516 degE)

Situation Report #31, 1. January 2022

Personnel @LDC: Saverio Panichi (ENEA, Camp Leader), Carlo Barbante (ISP-CNR, PI), Philippe Possenti (IGE), Jakob Schwander (unibe), Thomas Stocker (unibe), Remo Walther (unibe)

Personnel @DC: Gregory Teste (IGE), Olivier Alemany (IGE), Romain Duphil (IGE), Matthias Hüther (AWI), Calogero Monaco (ENEA), Michele Scalet (ENEA)

Weather at LDC: sunny, low wind – pleasant day

Meteo at DC 6 pm: T = −35°C, Wind = 10 knt, Wind Chill T = −49°C

Today it was tranquil at Little Dome C. Not because we exaggerated during the Sylvester night but because we were still with the reduced staff of six. Our colleagues decided to enjoy the entire first day of the year 2022 at Dome C.

Philippe has worked on the first day of the year to produce some cores with the shallow drill he is testing. Several adjustments were necessary but by the end of the day he produced some nice long firn cores.

At RADIX, we have included the new filter into the drill and tried several configurations with the two anti-torques at different locations. Some drilling happened but we were unable to come into production mode. Therefore, we decided to log the 250 m hole. Compared with our first logging, the situation is very stable with a mean inclination of no more than 5°.

Radix drilling depth: 252.0 m

Thomas Stocker and Carlo Barbante