Daily News Apr 9 - Apr 11, 2009
April 9, 2009
News of the Day:
Several things were accomplished today here at Lake El'gygytgyn. First the truck from Pevek arrived during the night with 300 bags of drilling mud. This was taken out to the platform this morning, counted, and stored for use.
The weather was spectacular today -- calm, clear skies and the sun had a little warmth to it despite the temperatures. The helicopter arrived here from Pevek at about 12:30 and offloaded 22 empty thermal boxes into the bus. People then scurried off to the core reefer to load the thermal boxes with core and get them quickly back onto the chopper. This was accomplished in about 50 mins thanks to the number of people we had on deck to do it along with the assistance of the bus and the bulldozer pulling a sled. The 22 thermal boxes each contained about 12 meters of core at a weight of about 6 kgs per meter. So the entire cargo weighed about 1.7 tons, well under the 2 ton capacity of the MI-8. The chopper was met in Pevek around 3 PM by Chico and Valarie who got a bit of a workout getting the cores stored safely in the reefer in Pevek. Back rubs are likely in order for all.
The chopper also brought in our new DOSECC drillers -- Jerry Jensen and Joey Bolin along with the pump we are borrowing from Kinross. So we hope to be back in the drilling business later tonight. We will have to send you pictures of the full moon rising up over the lake here, reflecting off the snow.
Sincerely, Julie BG
April 10, 2009
Daily News:
The night shift over Thursday night worked to thaw a hose to the submersible water pump and the pump itself, and then mixed mud in preparation for drilling. Frozen hoses became a problem more than once but was eventually mitigated. The shift drilled to 200.16 m and recovered only a short core at about 50% recovery due to torque problems.
The day at Lake E started out with some educational outreach. Tim Martin, middle school Earth Science teacher from Greensboro Day School, North Carolina, is participating in a portion of the Lake E field operations are part of the US NSF Polar TREC Program (Teachers and Researchers Exploring and Collaborating). Tim is learning about all aspects of the project providing summaries of everything from the Drilling operations and science planning to camp life and observations about the El'gygytgyn crater. Today with the assistance of ARCUS in Fairbanks, Alaska, Tim and PI Julie BG held an "webinar" that included an short on-line power point presentation and question and answers over the iridium phone. More than 200 children from the 4th grade to high school age logged in along with teachers and others from across the country. Questions came in from kids in Virginia as well as California about all aspects of the Lake E project.
The day shift continued drilling to 213 meters depth with a few intervals of fine muds but were back into sand and slow going. But we are making progress and playing it safe so we don't lose the hole.
April 11, 2009
Daily News:
Drilling continued today with the night shift reaching 231m. The sediments are changing, and we are seeing more intervals of stiff dry muds, some clay and silt layers interbedded with sand and some gravels....some coarse sediments much like we have seen above. The day shift was able to reach 254.5 m in the same materials. The core recovery was better today with longer shots but still in the 50% range or less at times. Mud consumption is pretty high to keep drilling.
We anticipate that we could hit the impact breccia anytime now. We have enough PQ pipe for coring to go to 305 m depth, but this is the weight limit (18,000 lbs) of the rig for this sized pipe. We plan to go for that and then stop for downhole logging probably on Monday night or Tuesday morning.
Weather was great again today -- pretty calm, highs of -11 C today and at night to -25 C. Jerry and Joey from DOSECC are getting into the routine of the shifts and camp life. Doug is getting wild now, painting 'war paint' on his face. The last few nights here the full moon rise was very red and we had light green auroras after midnight.
poka....Julie BG
Impressum