Sept. 20-23, four sites were drilled and installed in four days.
Date Drilled:
20. Sep 1973
Type:
Airport service road
Distance From Road:
40 m
Type:
Anthropogenic heat/cold source are the Churchill airport main runway, located 700m East of the site, and a railroad, later road that runs by 40m North of the site.
The vegetation is a boreal forest/fen complex. Sedges and Labrador tea are common, with other very small shrubs. The nearest black spruce/larch patch is about 150m away to the southwest.
Landform:
This is coastal Hudson's Bay. The land has been uplifting continually since the retreat of the continental glacier some 10,000 years ago. All parts of this coast were part of the sea at some time in recent geological history.
Lithology:
This is a hard rock site, with the hole entirely in hard rock (recorded as quartzite), seemingly with few fissures to migrate water.
The installation report shows sand and silt layers for the entire 15m of drilling.
Morphology:
Local relief consists of rock elements on the order of 1m with a horizontal scale of a few metres to several 10s of metres. Soil, both sandy silt and organics, fill low parts in the rocks and becomes a continuous cover about 1km to the south (away from Hudson's Bay). The well itself is on a near-flat and level place on the rock outcrop, with horizontal extent of about 50m, and littered with scattered rocks from 20cm to 2m in dimensions.
This is uplifting Hudson Bay coast, in the mouth of the Churchill River, which flows Northward some 6 km to the West of the site. There are deep layers of beach sands or riverine materials. The installation report on a 15m holes showed:
0 to 0.8m Sedge peat
0.8 to 2.4m clayey silt with a few stones
2.4 to 4.3m large rock fragments and sand
4.3 to 15.2m medium sand with some gravel (scattered stones).
Description:
Level, with gentle undulations in the rough rock surface. Steep slope to the sea begins 250m to the North, very gentle slope to the south includes the site.
