Finishing work at Dye-2

Mark and Babis coring at point 2050 m a. s. l.. 

Knowing that bad weather is about to move in we drilled as many firn cores as possible within short time. The plan was to analayze the cores later in the workshop tent during the upcoming stormy days.

Goodby friends and thanks for your great help! Mark, Liam, Babis and Dirk walk to the Hercules that brought  them back to Kangerlussuaq.

Standing at the margin of the taxiway we watched our friends boarding the Hercules. At this point we were thinking how nice it would be now also to take a warm shower. But also of all the remaining work - exciting on the one hand and alarming on the other hand because various important tasks were still on the agenda. ...and were hoping that the second half of our expedition might bring more favourable weather conditions.

Sampling cores inside the workshop tent - Mike and Alex.

Now being a group of four (Karen, Alex, Mike and Horst) we started to sample and log the cores we had drilled in the previous days. Strong winds forced us to sample the cores inside the workshop tent. However, stormy weather on the ice sheet often means "warm" weather and all four of us inside the narrow tent brought temperatures close to the freezing point. This made working with the ice cores difficult and we had to open the flap which helped to reduce temperatures - but - resulted in large amounts of snow beeing blown into the tent...

Karen consolidating our food supplies.

After three stormy days we broke down our tents and traversed north. Halfway to the "Camp-2" location one of our skidoos broke down and for one night we stayed in our improvised "Camp-1.5" (see also previous blog entry).