Greenland - 2026

This time, we have had to learn a few additional skills. The first is due to the visit of this fella last time I was up at Summit: Wildlife protection measures have been increased at Summit, so all field teams need to have a large caliber rifle (we have a Ruger M77 Hawkeye 30-06) and to have been trained in the use of said rifle. I have been traveling to Harrisburg most weekends to do 20 hours of rifle training with Green Mountain Defense, and my instructor Kent (who has kindly described me as competent with a rifle) Learning to shoot a rifle The chances of an encounter are very low, but the theory is it is better to know what you are doing should the need arise. We also did tower climbing and rescue training. The idea here is, if the drill breaks, we may need to climb the tower to fix it. We should know how to do it safely and how to rescue a teammate if necessary. Drill team members went to Blackhawk Tower for a three day intensive training course, and we are all now certified for cl...

 Our drill, the BigRAID, is a specialized electromechanical drill that was developed by the British Antarctic Survey as a rapid access firn drill. Unlike traditional ice-coring drills designed to extract ice cores, BigRAID cuts the ice into small chips. The chips are collected during a drill run and then they are discarded and dispersed at the end of the run once the drill sonde is brought back to the surface. This design allows for much faster penetration and provides the dry, unobstructed 28.5 cm wide holes required for the RNO-G instrumentation. BigRAID allows a team of two people to complete a 100-meter hole within less then two work days. Basically, the cutter head has carbide cutting heads that spin at XXX Hz. The chips are pushed up the flights of the static auger (the spiral) that is inside the rotating barrel. The drill is lowered into the hole using a winch and will cut into the ice until the barrel is full. The drill is then retracted and the chips are removed using a sn...

 Hi everyone, I am going back to Summit Station, so I thought it would be good to do another blog. I know I said this a lot last time, but this time I will probably be busier so it may not be a daily update. I also have a proposal to write, but we will see how it goes. Last time I was on a science team and we were attempting to do lots of ice calibration by lowering radio pulsars into holes to measure the refractive index of the ice with varying depths. This time I will be on Drill Team 2 with the goal of drilling the holes that the radio antennas get deployed into. The drill team will just be me and Delia and I have been promised long days in the field watching the drill do it's thing. As a reminder, this is what the experiment looks like Each dot on the map on the left is a location where we want to put a station. We are hoping to drill 5 stations in locations 44, 45, 54, 55 and 64. Each station is made up of 3 holes that are 100 m deep that the Science Team will be putting radio...