The Renland ice cap expedition, completed to bedrock in just 4 weeks, did a most excellent job of daily blogging. I think the answer is having a PI do the write-up, not a summer intern back in the office.
It's worth looking at how and what they provided, even some real-time logging data like ECM profiles. Renland is the first non-brittle Holocene core for Greenland. It is said to be a proxy for ice discharge down the Fram.
Very informative: http://recap.nbi.ku.dk/field_diaries/2015/
I could not agree more, but at $50K/day and 21 hours/day awake, should the PI focus on efficient use of the ship to support science or should s/he spent time blogging? The above site is very well done indeed ... I suspect we may be more chaotic in our presentations, as we are diverse group in disciplinary background, gender, age, culture, politics, style, and personal temperaments. Also, at 81 N we do not have the same connectivity that people farther south have. Iridium is charged by the second ... Think 1984-type dial-up modems at 1200 baud. Resources are always finite and the budget always shows where your priorities are. Compromise and balance are much harder in practice than in theory ;-)
As for the ice in Nares Strait, yes, I'd like it to be out of the way. The last thing an icebreaker wants to do is breaking ice. It is slow, gobbles fuel like crazy, and takes valuable resources away from science or, as we oceanographer call it, "wire time." It is always smarter to work with nature, not against it. Winds, tides, and currents are somewhat predictable and often the longer way is faster and more productive. Furthermore, multiple disciplines working together becomes a strength: one group's signal is another group's noise and vice versa.