Today was another great day in terms of weather and progress. We made it to the end of the line one today. Reaching flag 321 was a great feeling for all. Kudos go to the entire team, with special thanks to the drilling team, who has worked flat out for so many days.
Steve holding up the most westerly flag for the ONH -1 seismic line.
This represents 32 km from the start of the line and only about 6 km from shore. As we moved along the line over the past couple of days, more of Taylor Valley came into view. It is a majestic scene, with mountains that have had their sides sheared off by the enormous forces of ice sheets now long gone from this valley, resulting in their sides to seemingly all align as one gazes up this valley. Large glaciers lie on top of these mountains, hiding their full nature from our view, but overflow off the sides of in some cases precipitous rocky pinnacles, collapsing down into the valley.
At this moment, Stian and Marv are pulling the seismic cables back to flag 130, which is we stopped when we were still limping along with a malfunctioning compressor and decided to move into the thicker ice so the drillers would not have to wait for the seismic team to shot a hole. Our plans are to start doing seismics on the first year ice tomorrow. We will have to stop at some point as we will have to swap out our drilling rig for another as our’s is needed for Ron Sletten’s permafrost drilling. Hopefully this mix up will not cost us too much time. The plan is to know when the helo is expected and break down the drill rig and then install the new one in about an hour or so. I hope that all goes well. We have been doing so well in making up for lost time over the past week.
Even with this delay, I expect to have the first line completely done by the end of the weekend. Then it is on to the second line, which is half as long as the first line.
