a research team is planning to use an ice drill

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Ice Core Drilling

Ice cores are recovered using a spectrum of ice core drills. The most portable and convenient drill is the hand-auger which has a depth range of 30 to 40 meters. For deeper cores, a power source is necessary and the down-hole portion which actually extracts the core from the ice sheet or ice cap may be of several types. The electro-mechanical drill like that shown to the right which was used for the Antarctica - Plateau Remote site is very efficient for retrieving cores to about 200 meters depth on cold glaciers (temperatures well below freezing). Also electro-mechanical drills have been used by various countries (Australia, Denmark, France, Russia and the U.S.) to drill several kilometers through the major ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland. For extracting cores in 'warmer' ice caps and glaciers (photo below) where temperatures may be only slightly below freezing, the conventional thermal electric drill may be the best tool.

Ice core drills may be powered by various sources, but the two most common are fuel-powered generators and solar panels. Solar panels are a reliable, pollution-free and light-weight source of power. The use of solar powered drills for ice core recovery was pioneered by the Ice Core Paleoclimatology Group at Ohio State and Bruce Koci of the Polar Ice Coring Office in the early 1980s. The superiority of solar power for ice core drilling (where adequate solar insolation is available) was first demonstrated by the recovery of two cores the bedrock on the  Quelccaya Ice Cap in 1983. The ice cap margin is shown on the left. The solar powered drill system is shown to the right. Since then, several ice cores have been obtained from glaciers at high elevation (>5,000 meters above sea level) using special, portable drills powered with solar panels. The photo to the left done shows the solar powered system used on  Huascarán .

A new ethanol thermal  electric drilling system has been developed for intermediate (1,000 meters) ice coring in cold glaciers. The system is light-weight (about 1,000 kilograms including a six kilowatt diesel generator and a 6.6 meter diameter shelter), environmentally safe and capable of recovering a 100 millimeter diameter ice core at the rate of 400-500 meters per week. The system can be installed easily in 16 hours, and currently is ready for use in the  Franz Josef Land area.

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The epic engineering behind drilling 3,000 metres into the Antarctic ice

The Earth’s climate is currently in a warm spell between ice ages. Our planet moves in and out of an ice age every 100,000 years. That means that global temperatures drop so significantly that after growing for about 90,000 years, polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers start retreating for 10,000 years.

But the Earth’s warming and cooling cycles didn’t always work like this. Until one million years ago our world went through a glacial period every 40,000 years. What caused the pace to change so drastically is a puzzle.

Changes in the levels of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere will no doubt be part of the story. Air bubbles sealed within 1.5 million-year-old ice buried deep in Antarctica could explain why Earth’s ice ages changed in frequency. These ice cores could also help predict the long-term impacts of human-induced greenhouse gases beyond 2100.

To get to these buried air bubbles, scientists will have to reach three kilometres below the surface of the Antarctic ice in a feat of engineering that requires some seriously specialised machinery. In late September, the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) unveiled a drill designed to reach nearly 3,000 metres below the surface of the frozen continent. The nine-metre-long drill – made from stainless steel, aluminium bronze and titanium – will be able to retrieve ice cores up to three metres long while withstanding temperatures of minus 55 degrees Celsius along the way.

The Austrialian attempt won’t be the furthest we’ve reached back in frozen history. A Princeton University-led team managed to recover a much older core from a blue ice region back in 2017 . When snow is compressed into ice and the air bubbles are squeezed out, patches of translucent blue ice emerge as harsh winds sweep off fresh snow. In blue ice regions, the ice flows across rocky ridges and pushes up deep, older layers closer to the surface, which made the 2.7-million-year-old ice core more accessible. But because blue ice is not organised into neat annual layers, it is difficult to date it precisely, according to glaciologist Tas van Ommen who leads the AAD programme.

His team hopes to drill a single, continuous core in a location where ice layers accumulate year after year and are undisturbed by flowing ice, allowing them to study the ice back through time from today to the oldest possible age. The drilling site will be near the French-Italian Concordia research station at Dome C, Dome C, where the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA) drilled over 3,000 metres in 2004 to reach ice up to 800,000 years old.. “We now believe they were unlucky, picking a spot where natural geothermal heat from the bedrock below was enough to cause a little melting that removes the oldest ice,” says van Ommen. The new location will be less deep but located where the team believes there is no such melting.

Reaching the buried ice won’t be an easy feat. It will take the scientists two weeks to travel 1,200 km inland from Antarctica’s coast with tractor-trains and a mobile research station weighing 500 tonnes. Drilling won’t begin until 2021 and is expected to take four years.

A follow-up team to the European project, called Beyond Epica, which includes the British Antarctic Survey and 13 other groups from 10 European countries, is hot on the heels of the Australian researchers. They spent four years using aerial and ground-based radars to look below the ice and find an optimal drilling location in “Little Dome C”, just 40km from the previous drilling site. Olaf Eisen, a glaciologist from Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute, who led the first phase of the new project, says that their surveys were much more precise than previous explorations in the area. “In the past, it was easier to decide on a certain place [drilling location], because the target was never such a specific one,” he says.

With the summer season starting in November – when temperatures get up to a comparatively balmy minus forty degrees Celsius – the team will transport tents, fuel and equipment to the drilling site and set up a field camp. It's impossible to predict what the condition of the Antarctic sea ice will be like. If it doesn’t melt enough, the journey could become even more challenging and compromise their fuel supply, says Carlo Barbante, a paleoclimatologist at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, the lead of the next phase of the project. “If the sea ice is not melting and it’s [the site] too far away, we have to spend a lot of fuel to transport it with helicopters from the ship to the station,” he says.

The research team can only work in Antarctica until early February. After that, average temperatures will drop below minus 50 degrees Celsius. The plan is to start drilling in 2020, says Barbante. The drill will collect up to five metres of core at a time, which is brought to the surface and cleaned from the liquid used to seal the borehole. Each run takes a substantial time as the drill has to be lowered hundreds of metres into the ice and be raised again. The cold and short season will mean it will take around three to four years to retrieve the full ice core.

There are many things that could go wrong during the operations. The drill could get stuck in the ice and require a second hole to be drilled, as happened when colleagues drilled the 800,000-year-old ice core. This time, the Beyond Epica team is prepared for the eventuality and is bringing a spare drill.

The collected samples will be cut at the Concordia Station in order to leave an archive piece in Antarctica where they are well protected. The rest will be flown to the coast and then shipped in a freezer to Europe for measurements. “It’s much easier to store ice cores in the natural environment. You don’t need extra energy to cool them,” says Eisen. In 2017, a storage freezer failed and melted a collection of ice cores from the Canadian Arctic.

The ancient bubbles sealed in the ice core contain a sample of the atmosphere, which will allow paleoclimatologists to directly measure the past concentration of CO2, methane and other greenhouse gases. They will also be able to determine how temperature has changed in the past, not directly, but by comparing the isotopic composition of water molecules with an average ocean water standard.

Existing ice cores from Antarctica have shown that the level of CO2 started to rise substantially in the 19th century and today is nearly 40 per cent higher than it was before the industrial revolution. While the largest known natural increase (20 parts per million by volume) occurred over 1,000 years during the last ice age, scientists detected the same increase in the last ten years. The new ice core will hopefully extend the archive in time and provide new evidence of why our climate changed abruptly around a million years ago.

With so many challenges and unknowns in this kind of field work, Beyond Epica and the AAD both say it’s crucial to work together. While the lengthy drilling process prohibits them from using the same equipment, sharing their results will help answer one of the biggest questions in climate science.

“By bringing an additional drilling effort into the frame, rather than simply working together on one core, we can hopefully ensure that we achieve a replicated and very old record between us,” says van Ommen, adding that even the drill designs have become a “community property”. The original Danish design has been shared and refined by many nations.

Drawing on the lessons from a comparable exercise in Greenland where an American and European research group drilled just a few kilometres apart with different outcomes, at least two ice cores from Antarctica will be needed to replicate the results. “It will be actually pretty difficult to interpret only one ice core because you never know if what you find in that ice core is real or is an artefact,” says Eisen. Nevertheless, with the summer season starting imminently, both teams are gearing up to begin their field work. “Of course, there’s always some sort of competition. But it’s a friendly one,” laughs Eisen.

Updated 01.10.2019, 11:30 BST: The article has been updated to clarify the details of the Beyond Epic mission.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK

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How are ice cores obtained? How does the team get ready? How are the ice cores obtained? How are ice cores stored? How are the samples handled? How are the samples analyzed?

How are ice cores obtained? Ice cores can be extracted using a variety of methods and technologies that are chosen for the unique circumstances of each project. The planning that is required for such an expedition includes the cost and timing of preparing and transporting equipment and supplies up the mountains to the ice fields; living at high altitudes while drilling the ice cores; carefully describing, protecting, and storing the ice cores at the drill site; and transporting them (and the team, equipment, and waste) down off the mountain.

All the materials that will be needed by the team are loaded on a truck and taken as close to the drilling site as possible. In many instances, there are no roads to these regions, so there are unusual circumstances and unavoidable delays in getting there. From there, the equipment and supplies are carried by humans (in fitted backpacks) or hauled up the mountains on the backs of pack animals to a base camp. Local people are often hired, along with the pack animals they typically use, to carry the approximately 6 tons of camping and drilling equipment and supplies up the mountain. Weeks later, approximately 10 tons of equipment, waste, and ice cores are also carried down from the drilling site by the same group of porters.

How does the team get ready? The team spends a few days at base camp, which allows them to adjust to the change in air pressure and to make more red blood cells, which enables them to work at that altitude without an oxygen tank. Once the team has become accustomed to the air pressure at base camp, they then move higher on the mountain, and within a week or so, up to the elevation where they will drill for ice. Once there, they have to set up the drilling station, and also set up the tents they will live in for the next couple weeks.

How are the ice cores obtained? Ice cores are obtained by drilling a vertical hole into the ice with a drill. The smallest of the drills is a hand auger, which can be used to drill approximately 30.5 meters (or about 100 feet) into the ice. Some type of power source is required to drill deeper than that. The type of power that is used often depends on the nature of the ice.

An electro-mechanical drill is used to retrieve cores in very cold places, such as Greenland and Antarctica where the ice is hard. This hollow drill, which is 100 mm in diameter (approximately 4 inches), has a grinding bit that chews its way through the ice. As the drill works its way down into the ice, the central part of the drill is filled with ice. This piece of ice is the �ice core� that the scientists describe and analyze. The mechanical drills are very efficient at retrieving cores to about 200 meters (roughly 650 feet) in depth.

To extract cores in �warmer� ice caps and glaciers, where temperatures may be only slightly below freezing, a thermal electric drill may be used. This drill has a metal coil, similar to the heating element in a toaster, which melts its way down into the ice. Again, the ice core is the cylinder of ice that is inside the hollow drill bit when it�s pulled up. A new, lightweight, thermal electric drill has been developed for ice coring in cold glaciers. It is capable of recovering a 100 mm diameter (about 4 inches wide) ice core to a depth of 1,000 meters (3280 feet) over a period of a couple weeks.

Ice core drills may be powered by various sources, but the two most common power sources used are fuel-powered generators and solar panels (photovoltaics), which convert sunlight directly to electricity. Solar powered drills were first used in the early 1980s for ice core recovery. Since then, special portable drills that can be powered by solar panels have been developed and used by BPRC researchers. The solar-powered drill and solar panels are only taken on an expedition when the drilling conditions are predicted to warrant using them.

Once everything is operating, the team works as many hours each day as they can. The drilling stops when the team reaches a point where they can�t get a good sample anymore. Hopefully, this means they have reached the bedrock beneath the ice!

How are ice cores stored? The ice cores are put into a clear plastic sleeve, labeled, and lowered into a pit in the ice cap for temporary storage, until the drilling is finished. Then the ice cores are packed into special cardboard tubes, which are marked. Six cores can be placed into an insulated box. Then specially designed cold packs (�cryopacks�) are placed on the ice core tubes and a layer of foam is added before the box is sealed. (see picture). With this level of insulation and packaging, the cores are safe for 3-5 days of travel without danger of thawing. It is critically important that the ice does not melt while being transported.

The boxes of ice cores are hauled down the mountain to a waiting freezer truck, which hauls them to the nearest airport. They are brought back as frozen cargo, and delivered by another freezer truck to the cold storage facility at BPRC. Two large freezer compartments inside the cold storage area can hold approximately 3,000 meters (sections) of ice cores at temperatures of approximately -30 to -40 degrees Celsius. Attached to the cold storage unit are two cutting rooms that are kept at -10 degrees Celsius (about 21 degree Fahrenheit). This is where the cores are analyzed (on a light table) to note the thickness of the ice accumulation, any visible dust or ash layers or insects, and the sizes and shapes of air bubbles. The thickness of the layers are an indication of whether or not it was a snowy year, and the presence of volcanic ash or a distinct dust layer provides information about other conditions throughout the year as well.

Once they have been described, the ice cores are cut into samples for lab analysis. The samples are kept in sample cups at 21 degreees F. until they are ready to be carried to the �clean room� where the samples are filtered and analyzed chemically.

How are the samples analyzed? The liquid sample is analyzed for both organic and inorganic particulates (pollen, bacteria, dust, ash, and other solids), which are measured and identified. Microparticle concentrations in the melted samples are determined in 16 size ranges using equipment known as Model TA-II Coulter Counters and in 256 size ranges using another device called the Coulter Multisizer. The scientists also analyze the chemicals dissolved within each melted sample to determine the concentration of specific ions that were in solution in the cloud, such as: chlorides, sulfates, nitrates, etc. These ions (and other chemical markers) provide a measure of other types of activity (such as wind storms, forest fires, and testing or detonation of atomic bombs) at the time the snow fell. Radioactivity of particulates filtered from melt water samples is also measured.

A specific piece of lab equipment, a mass spectrometer, is used to determine the ratios of oxygen and hydrogen in the water molecules of each sample. This analysis offers evidence of the temperature of the sea surface, from which the water evaporated to form the clouds that delivered the snow to the mountaintops. Dr. Lin analyzes the samples using the mass spec. He processes up to 200 samples per week in the mass-spec lab.

Rapid Access Ice Drill

The Rapid Access Ice Drill (RAID) will drill a borehole through deep Antarctic ice, and core into the glacial bed and bedrock below. This new technology will provide a critical first look at the interface between major ice caps and their subglacial geology.

RAID Design

The RAID design is based fundamentally on a conventional diamond drilling system like that used in mineral exploration, modified to operate in polar conditions, operate in an autonomous manner, and reach the depths required by the scientific objectives.

Field Trials

Field trials in Antarctica gave us the opportunity to test the RAID design in real-world conditions. Over three sets of field trials at Minna Bluff between 2016 and 2020, we learned important lessons about fast drilling in ice and how to refine the drilling tools and process, ultimately ending in success.

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Visit our blog posts from the field! Get the inside perspective from RAID scientists and field support staff, and see interesting photos from our ups and downs.

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Science Planning Workshop for Research with the Rapid Access Ice Drill March 2-3, 2017 Scripps Institution of Oceanography La Jolla, California

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International Team to Drill Deep Through Antarctic Ice Into Ancient Sediments

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Researchers are preparing to drill through ice into sediments beneath the ocean floor deep below Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf to find out if carbon dioxide emissions targeted in international climate negotiations will head off catastrophic melt of the icy continent.

The research project, dubbed SWAIS 2C , will investigate the sensitivity of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to global warming of 2 degrees Centigrade. Scientists will retrieve sediments from beneath the ice in a bid to find out how the ice behaved during times in the past when temperatures were as warm as those expected in the coming decades. These records could reveal if there is a tipping point in our climate system when large amounts of land-based ice melts, causing oceans to rise swiftly. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet alone holds enough ice to raise sea levels by 4 meters, or about 12 feet.

The SWAIS 2C team includes some of the world’s top Antarctic scientists, led by Richard Levy of New Zealand’s GNS Science, Te Herenga Waka of Victoria University of Wellington, and Molly Patterson of New York’s Binghamton University. In all, researchers from seven U.S. universities will participate. Glaciologist Jonathan Kingslake , geodynamicist Jacqueline Austermann and paleoclimatologist Benjamin Keisling from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory are part of the team and will perform ice sheet and solid earth modeling to interpret the sediment cores.

The effort is supported by $3.2 million from the U.S. National Science Foundation , with the bulk of the funding going to a team of early-career scientists and postdoctoral researchers. More funding is coming from New Zealand, Germany, Australia, the United Kingdom and the Republic of Korea, with several other nations planning to join. The International Continental Scientific Drilling Program has also awarded the project a $1.2 million grant, the first for an Antarctic drilling program.

The other U.S. institutions involved are Colgate University, Northern Illinois University, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Central Washington University and Rice University.

“We have formed a team of drillers, engineers, field experts and scientists who are up to the task. Discoveries will show us how much the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could melt if we miss Paris Agreement targets,” Levy said.

Patterson said geological data can provide direct evidence of ice extent during past periods. “This information is necessary to assess whether climate models are able to capture observed variability during warmer times in Earth’s history prior to making any assumptions about the future,” she said.

When the field campaign kicks off, preparation teams will depart from Scott Base in mid-November for a 1,200-kilometer traverse across the Ross Ice Shelf to the Siple Coast, where land ice meets the ocean and starts to float. Once a drilling camp has been established, the wider science team including the Lamont-Doherty researchers will join the group and work through February. Field campaigns are planned for the next three years.

No one has ever drilled into the Antarctic seabed at a location so far from a major base, nor so close to the center of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Engineers at Victoria University of Wellington’s Antarctic Research Centre have spent four years developing technology capable of hot-water drilling through an estimated 800 meters of ice before taking sediment samples from up to 200 meters beneath the ice sheet. The sediments should help scientists understand how much Antarctic ice melted when the world’s climate was warmer, and allow them to predict what might happen in the future if global temperatures continue on their current trajectory toward 2.7 degrees C above pre-industrial levels.

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is considered highly vulnerable to climate change because much of the ice, which rests on bedrock thousands of meters below sea level, is exposed to the warming waters of the Southern Ocean. The international scope of the project highlights the recognition by multiple nations and science funding agencies that understanding its fate remains one of the largest uncertainties in predicting the global foot print of future sea level rise, said the researchers.

Adapted from a press release by the SWAIS 2C project.

RELATED: Antarctica and future sea level rise projections Ice sheet loss in Western Antarctica over the past 16 years Collapse of West Antarctica’s ice sheet is avoidable if warming is below 2°

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