Glaciological and Atmospheric Studies
December 2007
Date: December 1, 2007
Location: Detroit Plateau, Antarctic Peninsula
Latitude: 64º 5’ 11” South,
Longitude: 59º 36’ 42” West,
Elevation: 1933 meters above m.s.l.
Ice core drilled: 65 meters
Written by: Andrei K.
Snow storm. The temperature was getting warm, -6 ºC but the wind increased to 40 knots. Our drill tent was holding well but one wall had to be reinforced with more stake lines. Marcelo was able to take care of this in no time.
Fernando spent all day sharpening cutters. We did a little snow melting for the kitchen but spend most of the day inside of our sleeping bags.
Date: December 2, 2007
Location: Detroit Plateau, Antarctic Peninsula
Latitude: 64º 5’ 11” South,
Longitude: 59º 36’ 42” West,
Elevation: 1933 meters above m.s.l.
Ice core drilled: 65 meters
Written by: Andrei K.
The second day of the snow storm. Today it was less windy. We did some checks of our tents, made some good meals and went back to sleep.
Date: December 3, 2007
Location: Detroit Plateau, Antarctic Peninsula
Latitude: 64º 5’ 11” South,
Longitude: 59º 36’ 42” West,
Elevation: 1933 meters above m.s.l.
Ice core drilled: 65 meters
Written by: Andrei K.
Day three of the snow storm. We started running out of ideas of what to do. We are looking forward to getting back to drilling. Fernando and Alexandre set up an aerosol sampling station.
Date: December 4, 2007
Location: Detroit Plateau, Antarctic Peninsula
Latitude: 64º 5’ 11” South,
Longitude: 59º 36’ 42” West,
Elevation: 1933 meters above m.s.l.
Ice core drilled: 70 meters
Written by: Andrei K.
The weather is better today. We decided to try to go back to drilling. It took us a while to clean the drill tent of snow, and clean the drill parts from ice build up. We also started packing for our return flight to King George Island. We had eight boxes with ice ready to go plus some retro cargo and trash that we have to take back.
Date: December 5, 2007
Location: Detroit Plateau, Antarctic Peninsula
Latitude: 64º 5’ 11” South,
Longitude: 59º 36’ 42” West,
Elevation: 1933 meters above m.s.l.
Ice core drilled: 70 meters
Written by: Andrei K.
We couldn’t get on the radio this morning with Escudero Base but when we did we learned that the Twin Otter was on its way with two journalists from the Santiago Newspaper and the last member of our team, Jandyr Travassos.
They landed before lunch and we did a lot of group pictures and Ricardo. Jefferson answered some questions and showed them around the camp.
Ricardo, Heber and I left camp at 1:15 pm and after less than an hour flight we landed at King George Island. Weather at King George Island was good but on the way we did see a lot of clouds. The FACH pilots did a marvelous job of flying us back but they had to cancel the second flight.
We put all of the ice core boxes into our freezer and monitored the temperature for a while to make sure it was working well.
We left King George Island with Ricardo on December 5 on a Uruguayan Air Force C-130. During the next two weeks Jefferson was able to drill to 133 meters and another short 20 meters core. We have 18 boxes of ice that we are going to transport to Chile and later to the Climate Change Institute in Maine for analyses. Jefferson and his team came out of the field on December 15. According to our preliminary geophysical data, the ice thickness in the area is at least 300 meters. Ice flow conditions are very good because we are close to a dome like structure. We should get more data soon. It was a great field season and we managed to collect enough data that will help us to select the best possible site for a deep ice core that we are planning to recover next season.
We were awarded the following certificate from the Chiliean Institute for Antarctic Research.
