The Mass2Ant ice cores have made it Home safely ! ...a few more white hair, though!
As you will all remember, the Mass2Ant field team was safe back in Europe in early January 2018…not the case however for the precious samples from our 208m drilled ice core at the summit of Frank-Kenny Ice Rise, on the Princess Ragnhild Coast! These were carefully transferred from field insulated storage pallets to individual insulated boxes on our return to the Princess Elisabeth Station at the end of December 2017 …All into a running -30°C reefer container, of course (a to c).
Then followed several weeks of thorough caring from the IPF team at PES (daily survey of temperature), since no ship was available this year to repatriate the reefer “as is” to Cape Town and then Europe. The plan was the following: loading the boxes on pallets onboard the ALCI Illyushin (landing at 60 km from the PES Base) at the end of February 2018, for a 6 hours trip to Cape Town… with no refrigeration system! Experience shows that, in such conditions, the ice in the insulated boxes hardly gains 1°C per hour, which was admissible, with ice initially at -30°C…yet, we were anxious to check the cores on arrival in Cape Town!...Our “Man in Cape Town - Michel de Wouters” was there on the tarmac on late arrival at Cape Town Airport, and witnessed that the boxes where in perfect physical status… but still with no temperature check inside!..
The next we saw, where the picture taken at the Cape Town Meihuizen (our cargo agent specialized in Antarctic cargo) warehouse where the boxes were temporary stored before reshuffling to another reefer container in which they would be transported all the way to Rotterdam by ship.
Opening the boxes showed that the snow that we used as supplementary insulation was in good shape (d) …but two boxes had obviously seriously suffered from handling during the period between airport and reefer re-loading (e). We still don’t know what happened, despite repeated requests to the cargo agent…another set of white hair!... The damaged boxes were repacked in sticky cello sheets for the rest of the trip (f) and the whole 36 boxes placed on pallets, netted and secured to the floor and walls of the reefer (h) …and the refer ready to sail at -25°C (g).
It took a bit more than three weeks for the ship to reach Rotterdam, and we had a weekly report on daily temperatures of the reefer provided by Meihuizen. All ok.
On March 26th, the ULB shock team moved for the day to our industrial frozen storage in Asse (XPO logistics) to meet the reefer mounted on truck in provenance from Rotterdam.
A moment of stress when we snapped the custom seal and opened the doors…and yes, nothing has moved between Cape Town (h) and Asse (i)!..The cores looked perfect, with no sign of surface melting. The only thing to deplore is several supplementary breaks in the cores that were stored in the broken boxes!..
A few hours to swop the cores from boxes to pallets again (j,k and videos - thanks to Heiko Goelzer for the help and documentation!), and the team can smile (l), with the big relief of having now a full and integer 208m ice core to reconstruct past accumulation and sea ice extent of the last centuries and challenge the models!
Mana Inoue, our new post-doc in charge has indeed just arrived from Australia and is eager to work it out!..
See you soon in the lab!...Jean-Louis