Müller Ice Cap Daily Report Thursday May 15

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 Daily Report for 15 May 2025

 Today we managed to retrieve one more core from the main bore hole. Drilling is slow, as we have to grind through ice with quite a bit of sand and stone, something our ice core drill is not really optimized for. While the drill teams keep at it to get as much bottom material as we can, many other measurements are ongoing and Fei reports a very interesting mercury observation at Müllers Ice Cap: “On May 13, we observed the occurrence of a mercury depletion event in the ambient air over the snow surface. The event lasted about 2 days with the air mercury concentration dropped to zero at times. This event is a direct result of bromine explosion over sea ice, suggesting that the Müller ice core might be promising in reconstructing past sea ice extent in the region”.

 

What we have done today:

- Drilling main core all day, managed to retrieve one more core of silty ice, length 76cm.

- Normal logging and O18 sampling discontinued, only measuring of core length ongoing.

- Continued drilling of shallow core for firn-gas sampling, current depth: 35m. 

- Continued firn-gas sampling, two more levels sampled.

 

We are 13 in camp (Alison, Etienne, Iben, Rebecca, Fei, Richard, Nicholas, Tessa, Nerilie, Anais, Jamie, Julien and Bo)

 

Alison Criscitiello and Bo Vinther.

 

Wx at Müller: Mainly sunny. Wind decreased from 12-14kn before lunch to 0kn in the late evening and turning from 230 deg true to 270 deg true, temperatures between -17 and -12 deg C.

 

 

Caption: Fei doing surface sampling of Mercury at our beautiful location here at the Müllers Ice Cap. 

Caption: The core of the day, 76cm of ice with stones and sand, interestingly the clear ice is at the bottom of the core. It took a total of 4 drill runs of slow grinding to finally retrieve the core! 
 

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