Catch-up

Last time I wrote, we had just lowered our pump down our borehole in the hopes of raising it back out again. A lot's happened since then.

Mostly, it's been a tug-of-war between us and the pump. First the pump wouldn't start. Seeing as the thing was pretty far down the hole, we tried the easiest thing first--swap out the generator for a more powerful one. The rule-of-thumb up here is that at altitude generators are only good to 1/3 their rated capabilities. So a 2-kW generator migh only give out 2/3 kW. Our pump needs 2kW and we were using a 5-kW generator. Using a 6.5-kW one didn't solve the problem.

What did solve the problem was swapping out the pump for a newer one. Our working hypothesis is that the first one, the one we tested at ground level with water, seized up 100 m below the ice where the residual water froze into ice crystals.

We gave it two tries and on the second try, the pump worked! Two to three days later, after a fair amount of struggling with the pump as we tried to pull it back up, we were victorious.

This gave us the go ahead to move the rest of our equipment out to the borehole. We're now in the middle of lowering our antenna array down the borehole. Things seem to stick around 120 ft. below the surface. It could be a hose clamp on the casing of the hole. It could be that the hole has collapsed in on itself a bit. One way or another, we'll figure it out. But for now, I'm exhausted!