Images of

THE ARCTIC

GRIP Trip

Photos © 2005 Seth White

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When I was here in May, a few people were here on a short trip regarding a possible design for Summit "Station". It's in its infancy, but there is talk of building a bigger structure here to function as the main camp building. This is a ways off of course, and may never actually materialize. Much hinges on how much future demand there is for doing research here, especially from European nations. But some ideas are being kicked around, including a design by a few college students. I had wrote a little bit about this on a page I made in May so I won't rehash it here. The point of all this is that these students had come up with a design for this building, and a scale model of this building was erected out near the end of the skiway this year as a way to visualize the way the snow might drift around such a design. I didn't get a chance to take a look at it in May, but on Sunday 7/31, we happened to be going by there on our way to visit the old GRIP camp. Here we are milling around next to the snowmobiles.

This is a photo of this wooden model, and you can see the scouring of the snow around its base. In May it was standing several feet in the air on its stilts, so there has been some decent accumulation this summer.

So the trip itself was an afternoon drive out to the old GRIP (Greenland Ice Core Project) site. This was a drilling camp from the early 1990's, and is located about 30 km due east of Summit. It was simply abandoned and all buildings were left where they stood. It has since been drifted over by snow. The station staff visits here somewhat regularly, and has marked the entrance hatch to the main building with some flags. It's about a 40 minute drive out there, and the first thing you see is a little vertical line on the horizon...which is this antenna mast. So you drive and drive and drive and it never seems to get any closer, but eventually you get there. That's one thing about the ice - distances are not easily estimated.

A picture from the top of the antenna mast, with Keren on the left and Billy on the right. Keren is from UC Davis and is here with Eddie for the summer. Billy is the construction coordinator and will be heading to Antarctica to work on building a new drilling camp called West Divide, which is supposed to be a 7-year project. Sean, Jim, and Bill, the crew here working on raising the Big House, were the other three guys along for the trip.

Billy led this trip and decided to take three snowmobiles. Nansen sleds were hooked to the back of each, and with 6 of us going there were three drivers and one passenger on each sled. Along with survival bags, we put mattresses on each sled to make the ride a little easier.

So the entry to the main drill camp building (a geodesic dome) is marked by 4 flags. There is some plywood a couple feet under the snow which covers a vertical hole dug down to the top of this dome. The entrance is through a skylight.

Here's Billy after climbing down on a rope to open the place up.

The structure below was a geodesic dome with two stories inside. The upper floor seemed to be mainly a berthing area, while the downstairs was the kitchen, dining room, a small living room, and the generator room. The weight of the snow, however has caused the floors on both levels (especially the downstairs) to heave upwards. This happens due to hydrostatic stress, where the snow at a given level is stressed equally from all directions due to the weight of the snow above. However if one surface of the snow is free, such as the upper surface of the snow underneath the floor, this surface will be pushed out in that "free" direction. So thus, the floors are buckled upwards. Here is a photo of part of the upstairs area, which is also pretty well deformed due to the twisting and bending of the structure. I put my camera on a tripod, but with the slippery inclined floors it was hard to get the camera stable and level. So a few of these photos are a little crooked, but then again some of the subjects are a little crooked because they're sitting on a very non-level floor. Also, the whole place was obviously quite dark and so the only light was provided by flashlights. I set the camera for a 6 second exposure and shone the flashlight around to light the area. The result was pretty good, but even at 6 seconds I had to use a large aperture, so there is not a great depth of field on some of these pictures and a lot of stuff is out of focus. And I didn't really have all the time in the world to tweak things to get it just right...and at 40-50 below it's all the harder. So the next few are the best ones I got. This is a look at part of the upstairs area.

Another part of the second floor. The railing on the right is a staircase leading downstairs, and the little white boxes laying on the floor below the red tarp are full of Kellogg's Tropical Musli cereal, with text printed in several Scandinavian languages on the box. I picked one up and put it in my bag...and I'm staring at it right now as it sits on the table in front of me. I figured it would probably still taste pretty good but I haven't got around to eating it. I'm going to try it for breakfast tomorrow.

Downstairs, this is a photo of the pantry/dining room. I snagged a little jar of instant coffee too, and had a cup when we got back to the station. A lot of things have been scavenged from the GRIP camp, such as some plates and bowls which are now used in our galley, some couches and chairs which now sit outside the Green House as a "patio", and even a bottle of helium. Jason tells me it was a pain in the ass to hoist these things out that tiny skylight and up through the hole in the snow to the surface!

The kitchen. I didn't even know the GRIP camp was so close, let alone that it was still accessible. I only found this out a few days ago, so when I heard a trip was being organized I was keen to come along. Basically, this is Summit's version of Old Pole. The original South Pole Station is buried far under the ice now, and is gradually being crushed. There is still a shaft leading down to the old station, which sits out in the Clean Air Sector of Pole, but entrance is strictly forbidden since the place has become pretty unsafe over the years. Anyone caught going down there will be canned immediately...which, at this stage of advanced decay of the old station, doesn't seem like THAT unreasonable a policy. Some guy actually posted some photos on the web of a pirate trip down there a few years back, and the resulting backlash was not pretty. Recently, I have heard that the entrance to Old Pole has actually been welded shut. So to me, GRIP seemed like the next best thing. From what I've heard of Old Pole there is still food there, along with old magazines and lots of other stuff that was simply left when the station was abandoned. Same goes for the DYE sites out in other parts of the Greenland ice sheet. Granted the GRIP camp is only ~15 years old, but still, going to an old abandoned camp which has been buried under the ice is still a unique experience...especially because there's so much original stuff just left lying around there. There's even a few cartoons still posted on the fridge, and a handwritten sign lying on a table saying "Welcome to Hotel California - fine dining, by invitation only" or something like that.

Here is the generator room.

And one of me. I handed the flashlight to Sean and he shone it on me during the exposure. It is pretty cold down there, although not quite as cold as the tunnels underneath South Pole. I am pretty happy with the cold weather stuff I've bought, but still I was a little surprised that I didn't get the least bit cold. Sometimes, like today, I am warm as can be. Other days, I get cold surprisingly quickly. I haven't figured out any rhyme or reason to it, but at least I've learned a little bit about how to manage on those not-so-warm days.

Back on the surface, we walked over to a borehole, which is capped by this brownish tube. I am guessing this is the main hole drilled during the GRIP project, so if it is, that's a 3029 meter hole. Here I am contemplating this whole thing. A sister project, GISP2, was set up nearby the location of Summit Camp, and completed a few years after GRIP. It produced a similar ice core, and between the two of them a slew of papers have been written about all sorts of historical data pulled from analysis of the cores.

Jim was a sled passenger on the way back and ended up as a creature from the ice planet Hoth. Everyone got a kick out of his ice beard, and he said that now his wife would REALLY know that he was nuts.