New Photos: There’s ice in those hills!

Well hello all, another day out on the ice today. Turns out I was a bit sunburnt/windburnt yesterday so I put on some sunscreen today and it was much better. Now I have a tan, well my hands and face do. Today we returned to the same site as yesterday and we finished coring and finished our drilling transect. Alec and I drilled a 8.9m deep hole (all of the flights we had with us on the ice) and still didn’t get all the way through the ridge.

Alec and I in the reflection of Alec's goggles (bet if you try to type goggle, you'll type google first)



Alec drilling through the ice so we can measure its thickness.  We do this to compare with our EM measurements


Of course, doing these activities always forces me to break one of the golden rules of the Arctic, don’t sweat….but luckily it was a beautiful sunny calm day. Christian, Ido and Ian then continued on to a first year ice site while Alec and I did some more ground EM measurements at the first site.



Sea ice near Alert with the mountains of Northern Ellesmere in the background




Sea ice near Alert




A very large sea ice ridge (7m+ high)

 On the way back to the base we visited another potential first year ice site and took some pictures of the spectacular landscape.
We were even back for a hot supper in the cantina today, which was a nice treat. After supper we went down to put the EM bird together but had a lot of trouble, resulting in it taking much longer than it out to have. We also had to trouble shoot our time-lapse camera (just to make sure we have it ready for deployment whenever our helicopter is able to make it), and we had to trouble shoot the ice mass balance buoy we will deploy for the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory. We hope to do this tomorrow, but we will see.
Well I am off to bed as soon as this loads. It is midnight already and we will have breakfast at 7 to start by 8am.
Still hoping for a great chance to get some good underwater video. We did some yesterday, but it was quite cloudy and so did not get much light under the ice. However in the video there are some bright blue spots under the ice, which I think might result from ice penetrating through large hummocks or ridges which have little or no snow on them letting the light shine through.
Well that is it
Cheers