6:30 am: The alarm buzzes on my watch, and I roll over to light the propane stove next to the bed. The temperature inside my tent is pretty similar to the temperature outside, -20 degrees Celsius (-4 degrees Fahrenheit), but without the wind. My tent mate, a postdoctoral fellow named Romilly, usually jumps right up and is out the door in 10 to 15 minutes, but I prefer to lie in my cozy warm sleeping bag regretting my life choices for awhile.
7:00 am: Once the stove has brought the temperature up to a more tolerable level, I finally drag myself up. I pile on my layers: merino wool base layers, merino wool socks, a merino wool hoodie, puffy insulated pants, fleece jacket, puffy jacket, “Little Red” windbreaker (as opposed to the “Big Red” parka, which is usually way more coat than I need), fleece neck gaiter, hat, ski goggles, merino wool glove liners, leather gloves. I have a set of items that I keep inside my sleeping bag with me - cell phone, Garmin InReach device, and my contact lenses and solution - so that they don’t freeze overnight, and I have to remember to put them in my pockets before leaving the tent. I make a stop at the toilet tent to take care of some important business.
7:30 am: I join the rest of my team in the communal tent for breakfast, which for me is usually half a cup of coffee (a side effect of peeing into a Nalgene bottle is learning exactly how much coffee makes you pee) and a bowl of oatmeal with yogurt, and frozen berries if I’m lucky. At 8:00 we have our daily morning meeting, in which our camp manager updates us on the weather and the status of any expected incoming flights, and we finalize our plans for who is doing what fieldwork and which camp chores today.
9:00 am: After gathering our ECW (Extreme Cold Weather) bags and our snacks and water for the day, we pile onto snowmobiles to commute to our day’s planned work. For me, that is usually one of our two ice core drilling tents. One is very close to camp, only about 5 minutes away. I like to drive over the ocean of blue ice to that tent because it is nice and flat. The second drill tent is further, about half an hour’s drive over more difficult but stunningly beautiful terrain. Either way, we bring radios to communicate with base camp throughout the day.
The Blue Ice Drill (BID) tent, viewed from atop a 300 foot high ice wall
The view outside the BID tent
10:00 am: By this time at either drill site, we are ready to begin drilling ice cores! Each location has two drillers and one or two ice core handlers. The drillers run the drill itself, coring about 1 meter of ice at a time. That can take 15 to 20 minutes per run. When the meter of ice core comes up and the core is pulled out of the barrel, it is time for the core handlers to process the ice.
One of our awesome drillers, E, holding the BID core barrel as it brings up a meter of ice from the borehole
We align the core with the previous one, trying to make sure the breaks match up so we know which way the ice was oriented before it was drilled. We then draw an orientation line down the length of the core that we try to maintain across every section. We measure the exact length of the core section, note any breaks or quality issues, and then label it and bag it.
The core handling station inside the BID tent. The 10-inch diameter core is sitting on the tray, and our notebook, core cards, and writing implements are on top of an orange Pelican case. The white bucket is for broken or shaved pieces of ice that come off of the core.
The cores from the BID are unusually large - 10 inch diameter, compared to about 3 or 4 inches for most typical ice core drills. That means that a meter-long core section weighs about 100 pounds! Once we have labeled and bagged it, we carefully lift it (using 2 people and straps) into a styrofoam storage box where it will stay during its long journey from the Allan Hills to McMurdo (via plane) to California (via ship) to the NSF Ice Core Facility near Denver, Colorado (via truck), the whole time in refrigerated containers at about -20 degrees C. On a good day, we can get 10 or more meters of ice - that’s a lot of heavy lifting!
A 4-inch diameter ice core from the smaller drill. The drill itself is to the left - you can see the tower and the cable going down into the borehole, the white cover of which is closed. The arrow indicates which end of the ice core is the top.
What we write in the notebook
5:00 pm: If I am working at the closer drill tent, we usually come back to base camp for lunch, but if I am working at the further drill, we stay out for the entire day. We finish up and head back to base camp in time for dinner.
5:30 pm: But before we can have dinner, we have to store the cores we drilled that day in the storage trench! We bring the cores back to camp on sleds pulled by snowmobiles.These boxes are really heavy - the BID cores are 100 pounds each, but the boxes of cores from the other drill are up to 200 pounds because we put 9 cores in each box. It takes 3 or 4 people to safely lower the boxes into the trench.
Once the cores are stored, we park the snowmobiles and cover them up. I usually change out of my heavy work boots and take off my Carhartt overalls at this point, and then head to the communal tent.
6:30 pm: Dinner time! Our camp staff is amazing and have concocted all kinds of great meals for us using minimal equipment: shrimp and vegetable curry, chicken quesadillas, and spaghetti and meatballs are just a few examples of recent dinners. Once we’ve had a bit to eat, we have our evening meeting to talk about what happened that day and what to expect the next day.
7:30 pm: Each night two people volunteer to help with the dishes, and then the day is basically done. We hang out in the tent together, socializing, checking email and social media, sometimes playing games or even watching a movie.
Movie night on Thanksgiving! We had to hang blankets around the tent to make it dark enough.
9:00 pm: My bedtime. I make a last visit to the toilet tent and then continue on towards my sleep tent. I turn on that propane stove for awhile again while I get ready for bed, taking out my contact lenses and filling a water bottle with boiling hot water from a thermos. The water bottle goes inside the sleeping bag and helps warm it up quickly. I read for about half an hour until I get sleepy, then I have to turn off the stove (safety first!), put on a sleep mask to block out the 24-hour sunlight, and then I’m out for the night.
It’s been good to settle into a rhythm. The work is enjoyable, my teammates are great, and the weather doesn’t bother me any more. I’ve got about 5 more weeks of this ahead of me!