Müller Ice Cap Daily Report Wednesday May 14

 Müller Ice Core Drilling Project

 Daily Report for 14 May 2025

 An extremely exciting day today in the best possible of ways! In the second main core drill run, a small stone-like object could be seen in the core (approx. 603 depth), in the following runs, more and more similar objects appeared, and finally in the afternoon we got a core with a color change of the ice itself – clearly, we entered the silty ice seen near bedrock! The next two drill runs produced first some 27cm of core witha clear stone, and then 12 cm of core with another stone. Both short cores have been wrapped in black plastic to minimize light exposure to facilitate later luminescence dating. While the 27cm core got a few min. of light exposure, the second did not, thanks to a team effort diligently guided an carried out by Julien, who has experience in dark extraction of core material from ice core drills. Later on Iben organized a red light only zone in our freezer, so we could inspect the core. After dinner we all celebrated the days achievements with port wine and chocolate.

 

What we have done today:

- Drilling main core, drilled 7 fairly normal runs from 600.83m to 611.82, where logging stopped.

- Drilled 5 more runs, 2 of which returned silty core, while the last 3 only returned sand, but no core.

- Dark-extracted the last 12cm silty ice run from the drill.

- Logged and O18 sampled bags from bag 601 to 612.

- Continued drilling of shallow core for firn-gas sampling, current depth: 20m. 

- 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: Cloudy in the morning, turning sunny in the afternoon and then snowy in the late evening. Wind increasing from 0-2kn during the day to up to 12kn in the evening and turning from 0 deg true 150 deg true, temperatures between -16 and -9 deg C.

 

Caption: All camp members celebrating the days achievements. Left to right: Jamie, Etinenne, Anais, Fei, Richard, Nerelie, Alison, Rebecca, Tessa, Bo, Iben, Nicholas and Julien. 

Caption: Julien, Bo, Etienne and Iben inspecting the dark extracted silty ice core in red light conditions – note the 1cm wide rock in the core.

Caption: Richard, Iben, Rebecca (holding the bag in place from below), Julien and Alison assuring that the 12cm silty ice run is dark extracted from the drill.

Caption: Transition from clear ice to more brownish silty ice some 25cm from the top of the drill run corresponding. The transition happens at a depth of 611.25m.