Airborne team preparing instruments for installation, Allan Hills ice coring team working through technical issues

Dec 5

This week, the two COLDEX teams, one at the South Pole and one at Allan Hills, each made important progress while working through various challenges. COLDEX Director Ed Brook and Oregon State University postdoc Asmita Banerjee are in Christchurch and scheduled to fly to McMurdo on December 7, and will join the Allan Hills team soon after that.

Airborne team preparing instruments for installation

The COLDEX Airborne team has completed trainings and is working on assembling and testing the available University of Texas Institute for Geophysics instruments in the I-185 RAC tent at Willams field (see photo of Dillon Buhl, Shivangini Singh and Gonzalo Echeverry completing a six hour ground test of the UTIG airborne instruments). The University of Kansas team worked on preparing their antennas for installation (see picture of UHF antenna fairing unboxed for testing in front of Mount Erebus). Some critical components (KU’s radar electronics and UTIG’s gravity meter) remain in the cargo stream, but otherwise things are proceeding well for for a smooth aircraft install on Basler MKB next week. - update from Duncan Young, University of Texas faculty member and Science co-lead for base operations and flight planning for project I-185

Dillon Buhl, Shivangini Singh, and Gonzalo Echeverry completing a six hour ground test of the UTIG airborne instruments

UHF antenna fairing unboxed for testing in front of Mount Erebus

Allan Hills ice coring team working through technical issues

The Allan Hills team has unfortunately run into some technical issues this week. Some troubleshooting was required on the Blue Ice Drill (BID), putting Starlink to good use as our driller Mike Jayred was able to consult with the Ice Drilling Program (IDP) to get the problem fixed. We are now awaiting calm enough winds to set up the tent. Elizabeth Morton continued drilling with the Eclipse in the Cul-de-sac. We’ve reached 50 m depth and maintained good core quality! On Thursday, we started running into problems and it became clear the drill cable required re-termination. Again, grateful for Starlink to be able to consult with IDP! Others in the camp have been drilling with the PICO hand auger, getting some exploratory data in the cul-de-sac. The toughest part of our week was having to say goodbye to two of our team members, John Higgins and Mike Jayred. Mike sadly experienced a physical injury that requires medical attention. They will both be very missed by everyone at camp. We hope to move forward with BID drilling with Elizabeth as our driller. - update from Julia Marks Peterson, Oregon State University graduate student and I-187 team member