The Shipboard Scientific Party boarded the Aranda in the port of Leith, Scotland, on 17 August 1999. After three days of mobilization, all equipment was loaded and installed. Following minor modifications, launching and recovery of the drill rig was tested successfully. We established the core cutting facility, thin section preparation laboratory, computer network, and digital photography studio prior to departing for the East Greenland coastal region on 20 August. The 5 days of transit from Leith to East Greenland were used to finalize installation, test equipment, and develop working schedules. A summary of the geographic locations of the drilled sites is given in Table T1.
We arrived in the Transect EG68 area around midday on 25 August and immediately began collecting the first 22-km-long sparker seismic line, DLC99-1, using the BGS sparker and single-channel streamer. The first drill site (SEG03) was occupied in the late afternoon, and drilling commenced once it had been confirmed that the ship's dynamic positioning system was able to hold station using the Global Positioning System (GPS) with differential corrections from shore-based radio transmitters. During the night, four largely unsuccessful coring attempts were made, with only minor recovery of mud from one hole and more mud recovered on the drill rig frame. A calculation error in the navigational correction that resulted in an offset between the target and actual drill position of ~30 m was discovered and corrected.
We moved to Site SEG04 on the morning of 26 August, where we cored the first lava. An electrical fault in the drill rig transformer forced a pause in drilling. This fault was temporarily corrected with an auxiliary cable that subsequently caused an increase in the time needed to deploy and recover the rig. Drilling operations were resumed at Site SEG04 and continued at Sites SEG05 and SEG06 before unstable weather with gale force wind in the late afternoon necessitated a halt to all operations. Shelter was found in the entrance of J.A.D. Jensen Fjord, allowing repair of the drill rig transformer and cables and reestablishing full functionality of the drill rig.
The wind decreased sufficiently by the morning of 28 August to continue operations. The 10-km-long sparker Line DLC99-2 was collected before drilling started in the afternoon. Fine weather allowed drilling at Sites SEG07–SEG20 and redrilling of the successful Site SEG05. Sites SEG13 and SEG16 were terminated because the ship lost position. A total of 32 km of sparker seismic lines were collected and 18 sites drilled on this first transect.
Because of increasing wind and sea state in the late evening of 30 August, we stopped operations and sailed for Ammassalik, South Greenland, where we docked on the morning of 1 September after rough sailing in a storm with wind speeds up to 28 m/s. The port call in Ammassalik was additionally demanded by the necessary installation of a receiver to obtain GPS differential corrections from satellite instead of relying on shore-based radio beacons, which in future transect areas would be too distal to give a reliable signal. Installation and trials were finalized on the morning of 2 September, after which we left Ammassalik, sailing toward Transect EG65.