Müller Ice Cap Daily Report Tuesday May 20

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 Müller Ice Core Drilling Project

 Daily Report for 20 May 2025

Another successful and eventful day here in our camp! First of all the firn-gas drilling and sampling program found the top of the air bubble lock in zone. This is the depth at which the air starts to be really isolated from the atmosphere, and hence the air in the ice is several decades old. The lock in zone is usually only some 10m deep, so we are also hopeful to wrap up the firn-gas project within days -weather permitting. In the main bore hole, we managed to complete a bore hole logging from bottom to the top of the liquid column. This is another mile stone, both because the logging was done with our brand new mini-logger and due to the fact that this is the last thing we needed to do before taking down all the main core drilling equipment. Today we also managed to fly all remaining main core boxes to Eureka – thank you to the Twin Otter crew for coming right before the weather closed, and to DFO and Eureka personnel for getting the boxes safely into our Eureka freezer.  Finally, we had a great celebration of Ali´s birthday in camp, with Pizzas for dinner followed by freshly baked cake with strawberries, and birthday songs both in English and Danish. For the latter, Ali picked the following instruments that we all then imitated: guitar, bamboo-stick whistle, and plug going into the eclipse drill! Also, balloons started to appear here and there in camp, making the occasion even more festive.    

 

What we have done today:

- Celebrated Ali’s birthday.

- Logged main bore hole with mini-logger.

- Continued drilling of shallow core for firn-gas sampling, current depth: 54.38m. 

- Continued firn-gas sampling, two more levels sampled (lock-in zone reached).

- Groomed half of the skiway.

- Flew out all remaining main core boxes and some shallow core boxes by Twin Otter. 

 

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: Sunny and calm until late afternoon, then increasing cloud cover and in the evening wind up to 20kn from 200 deg true and light snow fall, temperatures between -14 and -7 deg C.


Caption: In the evening we celebrated Ali’s birthday with pizza, cake, birthday songs and presents and then finally with drinks! Left: Richard, Nerilie, Etienne and Tessa, looks on, while Rebecca presents Ali with the cake. Right: A toast to Ali, by all of us. Visible in the frame: Anais, Richard, Fei, Nerilie, Rebecca, Tessa, Bo, Ali and Juliens arm.


Caption: Left: After Iben (taking) the picture and Richard (in the picture) had finsihed cleaning/raising skiway markings and Bo (on the Skidoo) had done some grooming, we managed to (Right) fly Canadas deepest sections of ice core out to Eureka as well as all other remaining boxes of main core, Ali and Bo are clearly excited!



Left: Julien is giving the mini-logger one more carabiner to make absolutely sure we get it out of the bore hole again, Nicholas and Richard observes, while Iben stands ready at the winch control. Right: Mini-logger back out of the bore hole, but how to get the data out? Julien video-phoned tech. support, i.e. Kevin, who is now on the Greenland Ice Sheet! Fantastic to have modern satellite-based internet.





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