Well today we went back to the same site as yesterday. We went to take two ice cores. We had only planned to do one but one of the cores we took yesterday broke through its plastic bag and we needed to take the core again as it was meant for texture analysis and it is important to know what side is up so that you can correlate the texture with depth down the core.
Along the way to the site today Alec spotted a whale, well sort of, if you use your imagination and have been staring at ice as long as we have.
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| Alec's whale |
We also did more EM measurements along the drill transect from yesterday, and finally we had to do some repairs to the IMB we put out yesterday. We need to go visit it again as we weren’t able to fully fix it but oh well we tried.
Photo
We also did a little detour trip from our IMB towards the open water, however we couldn’t get anywhere close to it (due to all the broken up rubble ice we were still a kilometer or so away).
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| Alec on a ridge of ice and snow |
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| Snow crystals that have grown vertically up from the snow below |
Today our IMB arrived on a Twin Otter that was bringing up more of the Project Switchyard study group (from various institutions in the US). We put it out near the base tonight just to let it run over night so that we can make sure we don’t encounter the same issues as this one we have just deployed.
Back at the base we took the time to process one of our texture cores, one from a first year ice site. Below are two pictures of the bottom 40cm or so of the core. We use a band saw to cut a 5mm thick piece of ice from the center of the core (vertically all the way down the core) and then put it between to cross polarized filters. This lets you see the crystals of the ice. You can see a switch from frazil ice (which is ice that forms during freeze up) and then columnar ice, which forms by freezing to the existing ice floe). We were surprised to see so much frazil ice.
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| Frazil ice under cross-polarized light |
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| Columnar ice crystals under cross-polarized light |
And finally while we worked today I had my little GoPro camera set up to do time-lapse so I hope you enjoy our frantic work pace.
Well that is all for tonight. Tomorrow we will get up at the usual time and go down to process another texture core before returning to the base for brunch (saturdays and sundays). Then in the afternoon we go back to the CRREL IMB site to try to fix the buoy or we got to another first year ice site.
Cheers
Justin
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