Quick updates from the field- text message at a time!

It seems the gang has been too busy to send me any pictures or extended text for the last few days, but I do get some status updates.  Here are some highlights from them!

From Erich:

"Update. Mon we camp moved to core 5. Tate and the surveyed w everything the whole way. Tues gabe and I drilled core 5 to 27.07m depth.Cold windy miserable day"

The team still got a lot done- with spiral radar surveys and using the kite-camera to survey for surface roughness.

 "Today (wed) was really crappy weather. Gabe & I did pit in the morning before it was too bad. No radar survey today but Tate & Thomas did pit reflector tests with Tate's radars"

The 'pit reflector tests' to which Erich refers are essentially ground-truthing tests- putting a metal reflector at a known depth in a pit and surveying with the radar to determine the radar wave velocity.   It looks like more bad weather will be arriving Thursday, so the team will try to go east if they can.

"Hope to move to core 6 camp on sat. Still planning on all 7 sites and summit. CPS said today that twin otter will leave a case of oil @ core 7 so that should solve the oil crisis."

The 'oil crisis' to which Erich refers is the fact that the 2-stroke oil-injection system has been injecting more oil into the engines than was budgeted- standard 2-stroke mix is 50 parts gasoline to 1 part oil, but the snowmachines themselves do the mixing and have been using more like 35:1 instead.  So the 2-stroke oil brought by the team will run out before they reach summit.  This is just as bad as running out of fuel, as without oil the engines will seize up and stop running entirely...

We're all hopeful that this resupply of oil goes smoothly, and that the weather improves!