Here is Luke's portrait entitled "hanging out in the tent". The wind has been kicking up here, causing lots of snow drifting. Good news is that winds warm things up (mixing warm air above with cold air at the surface). Bad news is that Bonnie got trapped in her tent by a drift when snow froze the tent zipper. After a few panicked moments, she warmed up the zipper by breathing on it. In the end she was only trapped for about 15 minutes.
Not the best example, but here is a photo of Tent City before the drifting.
Tent City after the drifting. Luke took this photo yesterday. Today the drifts are even higher.
This is my impersonation of Sir Robert Falcon Scott. Antarctic explorer. Scott is famous for losing the race to the South Pole to Roald Admunsen by a few weeks, and perishing on the way home a few days walk from his ship (photo by L. Ziemba).
This is the U.S. GISP II (Greenland Ice Sheet Project II) bore hole where the 3200 m ice core was drilled between 1989-1993. This ice was provided a high resolution of the past 200,000 years. But the best record goes back 110,000 years. This is one of the reasons we are here. What we learn about the current Arctic atmosphere and snow chemistry may help the glaciologist interpret this long term record. The other thing I recently learned is that Summit Camp was mis-named. We are not really at the Summit of the ice sheet, we are 28 km due West of the highest point. A group of European scientists drilled a complementary ice core at the GRIP (Greenland Icecore Project). Since we are not really at the Summit, Summit Ice Camp is moving a little over a meter per year towards the coast.
