Welcome to the 8th International Ice Drill Symposium
During the 2018-19 Antarctic field season, the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) BEAMISH project drilled three holes through the Rutford Ice Stream, West Antarctica, accessing and instrumenting its bed through 2152m of ice, the deepest hot water drilled access holes yet created. This was the culmination of almost 20 years of preparation and planning and following on from unsuccessful drilling...
Following the failed 2012 attempt to access Subglacial Lake Ellsworth in West Antarctica, using a specially designed hot water drill, a programme review was undertaken. An international board of experts assessed the reasons for the failure, and made recommendations on the modifications necessary to facilitate successful deep (>2 km) subglacial access using the technique of hot water drilling....
Repeated measurements of the deformation of the deep boreholes on the Greenland ice sheet informs on the basal sliding, near basal deformation and in general on the horizontal velocity through the ice. Results of the logging of the boreholes at Dye3, GRIP, NGRIP, NEEM and Camp Century through the last 40 years by the Danish Ice and Climate group will be presented and discussed. The results on...
How to acquire good quality of ice cores is becoming an increasingly key influence factor due to abundant information of climatic variation in intact ice cores. Compared with the conventional ice coring drill such as armored cable electro-mechanical drill, hot-water ice-coring drill has its unique advantages: drilling rapidly and environment friendly. The hot-water ice-coring drill is used...
After the devlopment of the SUBGLACIOR drilling probe, we get the oportunity to try this tool a few times close to the Antarctic Dome C station. We will present here the reasults of these three testing seasons.
The Agile Sub-Ice Geological (ASIG) Drill system was first used at Pirrit Hills, Antarctica during the 2016-2017 field season, when IDDO (Ice Drilling Design & Operations, now IDP) retrieved 8 meters of granite core from under 150 meters of ice. This is the first time that a rock core more than a meter long has been retrieved from beneath glacial ice. A previous borehole was abandoned due to...
Since the last update at the Seventh International Drilling Workshop on Ice Drilling Technology, in Madison, WI USA in September of 2013, the drilling group at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH) has been responsible for several shallow, intermediate, and deep drilling operations in both Greenland and Antarctica. The deep drilling program, EastGRIP, placed near the onset of the North East...
Since 1957-58 IGY only few penetrations through glacial ice-bedrock interface took place. Essential progress in ice drilling and new scientific goals stimulate development of drilling and sampling technique of rock-imbedded ice and sub-glacial bedrock. There are two objectives: 1) penetrate through natural obstacle and continue ice coring and 2) sampling of glacier-bedrock interface materials....
The brittle ice zone (BIZ) is a persistent challenge for deep and intermediate-depth polar ice core projects. Increasing ice overburden at depth pressurizes trapped air bubbles, resulting in fracture of ice cores as they are drilled brought to the surface. Only at depths/pressures where air bubbles fully transition to clathrates is this breakage relieved. Ice core fracturing has negative...
The Agile Sub-Ice Geological (ASIG) Drill was developed by U.S. Ice Drilling Program (IDP) for the U.S. National Science Foundation. The design of the system leverages existing exploration drill equipment to create a drill capable of recovering ice core at any targeted depth up to 700m and 10m of rock core beneath up to 700m of ice and firn. The system was developed and tested in 2015 and...
Ice freezing and thawing process beneath the Antarctic ice shelves is related to climate changing and studies of ice layers at the ice shelves bottom will facilitate further analysis of the interactions between the ice sheet and the ocean. Upwards thermal coring mechanism for using beneath ice shelves equipped with underwater automatically operated system is proposed. The formation mechanism...
The IDP Winkie Drill have deployed to two Antarctic field seasons. The first successful deployment was to the Ohio Range during the 2016-2017 field season where it recovered subglacial bedrock from five boreholes ranging in depth from 12.0 to 28.3 meters using the standard AW34 coring tools. Access boreholes were created with modified Kovacs 2-inch augers. The drill was deployed to the Ong...
The subglacial aquatic environment may provide unique information about microbial evolution and the Earth’s climate in the past. The prototype model of RECoverable Autonomous Sonde (RECAS-200) could penetrate through ice to the depth of 200 m by melting ice with thermal drill bit, then take water sample and detect the physical parameters (temperature, pressure, conductivity and pH) of...
HOTROD is a prototype melt-tip drill for rapid sampling of ice-sheet temperatures. The relatively low-cost melt-tip, which has thermistors embedded along its integrated tether cable, is intended for single-use deployment. This means the melt-tip is not recovered following insertion of the temperature sensors. The main shaft of HOTROD is 120 cm in length and 5 cm in diameter. Forward heating...
Snow temperature at 10 m depth in ice sheets and ice caps represents the local average annual temperature. Up to now, in Antarctica, a fair number of long-term observations of temperature and 10 m snow temperature have been made. However, only a handful of measurements have been taken at the eastern part of East Antarctica. In order to obtain the snow temperature data at Zhongshan Station –...
The access to sub glacial regions gains interest in terrestrial and extraterrestrial research in the past years. In Antarctica lakes or other interesting sub glacial features have been accessed via mechanical (coring and non-coring), hot water or thermal drilling. Still the most of these areas are unexplored because of the lack of rapid access drills. The discovery of liquid water below the...
We present the main aspects of the design, development and application of the multifunctional borehole logger for geophysical monitoring (temperature, pressure, axis incline angle and radius of borehole cross sections) of ice boreholes. The logger was designed to use in the central region of the East Antarctica in the areas of Dome A at the Kunlun station (China) and Lake Vostok at the Vostok...
Most of density quantification methods require a sample, its preparation and few measurements. Procedures are laborious, slow and time consuming. Due to vertical and horizontal density variations a single vertical density profile has significant uncertainty. Multiple profiling allows increase precision of mass balance measurements. Field and laboratory measurements show that...
We present a field-portable ice core saw capable of both horizontal and vertical cuts, with adjustable feed rate, adjustable cutting height, fast retraction speed, and feed clutch. The design is a moving-saw design, and includes emergency stop and a remote control. Accessories such as ECM can be mounted on the saw. The design is currently being used at the National Centre for Antarctic & Ocean...
The U.S. Ice Drilling Program (IDP) has developed several hot water drills to support U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) funded research projects. Recent upgrades to the IDP Small Hot Water Drill leverage a design proven in the field for over two decades. The Sediment Laden Lake Ice Drill (SLLID) is designed to be portable over lake ice by just two people and capable of creating access...
The U.S. Ice Drilling Program (IDP) has the need to efficiently develop and operate drilling equipment. A prototype ice well has been created at the University of Wisconsin as a significant step in addressing this need. The well provides a column of ice approximately 15m deep and 25cm in diameter at temperatures as low as -20°C. The well provides significant cost savings to the program by...
As one of the effective methods of rapid ice drill, thermal drilling is widely used to study ice sheets and glaciers. After drilling, the refreezing of the meltwater in the borehole is the key factor hindering down-the-hole observations. The temperature distribution in ice around thermally drilled borehole has a direct impact on the closure rate of the borehole. In order to determine the...
Replicate coring systems (RCS) provide a means for additional core samples with high scientific value to be collected from an existing borehole. Considerable conservation of resources can be realized by the implementation and deployment of core replicating technology which is integrated into an established drilling/coring system. A long range (>3km) core replicating system has been designed...
The stable isotope, aerosol, and atmospheric gas records in ice cores provide exceptional archives of past climate. Supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (Office of Polar Programs – Antarctic Glaciology), a new 1,750-meter long ice core (~54,000 years in age) was recovered from South Pole, Antarctica, during the 2014-2015 (0 to 736 m) and 2015-2016 (736 to 1750 m) field seasons...
Efficient operation of drill equipment in the field can quickly be thwarted by bad weather. A structure to protect equipment and operators during poor weather conditions can significantly reduce the amount of down time during expeditions. However, structures are often a logistical burden and time consuming to erect. A lightweight tent, designed in collaboration with Fabricon, LLC, was...
The 4-Inch Drill, designed and built by the Polar Ice Coring Office (PICO), has long been the work horse of the U.S Ice Drilling Program (IDP) for ice core recovery to 300 meters. While the 4-Inch Drills are still in use, the systems are aging and in need of replacement. To address the continued demand for robust and lightweight shallow ice coring drills, IDP has developed the new Foro 400...
In order to obtain short additional core samples from intervals of specific interest (tephra layers, basal ice, shearing zones, etc.), the simple wireline side-wall thermal coring system is proposed. The corer includes driven unit, bendable core barrel, and thermal coring head. The side-wall coring system can be precisely positioned in the zone of interest. To this end, it can be equipped with...
Subglacial sediments are of great interest to the science community. They can contain physical, chemical and biological information that can reveal changes in ice sheet history and identify and characterise life in those environments. However, retrieving sediment cores from up to 1000’s of metres beneath the ice surface, through hot water drilled access holes, at remote field locations,...
Dielectric profiling (DEP) is a fast, non-destructive method to precisely scan the dielectric properties of an ice core in as high depth resolution as a few millimetres. Initially being proposed to acquire conductivity profiles, the method has been extended to also interpret relative permittivity and ultimately determine the firn’s density and its pure ice phase’s conductivity by inversion of...
Hot water drilling technology is prominent in many kinds of polar investigations due to its environment-friendly medium and fast drilling speeds. However, its disadvantage is that it cannot directly obtain ice and bedrock cores. To sample cores from specific intervals, we propose to replace the bottom nozzle with PDM-motor + drill tools that can be directly driven through hot water flow to...
Understanding ice sheet dynamics is of high interest to predict the future ice sheet response in times of changing climate, and is also crucial to estimate borehole closure rate during accessing ice sheet especially by deep ice core drilling. Impurities in ice is one of the most influential factors on mechanical properties of ice and causes localized enhanced deformation. High concentrations...
Recent studies have shown that stratigraphically disturbed meteoric ice bedded at Vostok Station between 3318 and 3538 m dates back to 1.2 Ma BP, and possibly beyond (Lipenkov et al., 2019). As part of the VOICE (Vostok Oldest Ice Challenge) initiative, in the 2018/19 austral season, a new deviation from parent hole 5G-1 was made at depths of 3266-3291 m with the aim of obtaining a replicate...
While drilling deep boreholes in Antarctica and Greenland researchers from many countries have faced serious challenges already at the depths over 2500 m, while below 3000 m these complications turned so dramatic that further penetration was almost impossible. This phenomenon was even given its proper name, i.e. ‘warm ice drilling issue’, as with increasing depth the ice temperature is rising....
The Intermediate Depth Drill (IDD), designed and built by the Ice Drilling Design and Operations group (now IDP), was used to drill a 1,751 meter deep ice core during the 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 field seasons at the South Pole for the South Pole Ice core (SPICEcore) project. A team of 10 people worked 6 days per week, 24 hours per day, in 3 shifts to recover the 98 mm diameter ice cores, up to...
EGRIP camp was established in 2015 by packing down the former NEEM drilling camp and pulling all materials and structures, including the main building on ski to the EGRIP site by a 440 km traverse train. For the first time on the Greenland ice sheet, nothing was left behind, except for the borehole and 25 ton broken and buried timber roofs of the former underground trenches. At EGRIP all...
The results of operations to penetrate into the subglacial lake proved that with the differential pressure of -0.2 MPa, lake water ingresses into the borehole through the annular clearance between the drilling assembly and the borehole walls, rising up to 15 meters above the drilling assembly. While rising through the annular space, the water mixes up with the filling liquid. This creates an...
Beginning in program year 2016, Ice Drilling Design and Operations (now IDP) began working with the Ice Drilling Program Office, science community representatives, and the Antarctic Support Contract personnel to conduct an analysis on using the Deep Ice Sheet Coring (DISC) Drill for the next U.S. deep ice coring project versus using an adaptation of the Intermediate Depth Drill (IDD), now...
In the 2018/19 austral field season, we successful drilled an ice core to bedrock at a depth of 651 m on Skytrain Ice Rise situated at the south of the Ronne Ice Shelf, Antarctica. The team of six (for much of the season) comprised five driller/logger staff, and one person to manage the camp. The full project took place over a single field season, including setting up and tearing down of the...
In this presentation we will describe the four seasons spent for set-up and drilling at EastGRIP, including a description of some new innovations and their effect on drilling performance and core quality. The first challenge at EGRIP was adapting the drilling to the sub-surface trenches that were created using a so-called balloon technique, which has some advantages over traditional trench...
A modified 82mm ECLIPSE ice coring drill was used to drill to 260m on the Antarctic coast near the Princess Elisabeth Station during the 2018-2019 season. The drill was modified to operate in Estisol fluid, including the use of a booster pump, pressure seals, and borehole bail. Switching between dry and wet operation can be accomplished in minutes. Core quality through the troublesome 100m...
The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) Rapid Access Isotope Drill (RAID) is an innovative new class of electromechanical ice drill. Once the bedrock is reached, it can now be fitted with a percussive head (P-RAID) to deliver a bottom-of-the-hole rock sampling capability.
This head uses a local control loop to manage weight-on-bit downhole, with a decoupled rotary-percussive drill mechanism and...
The second deep ice coring project at Dome Fuji, Antarctica reached a depth of 3035.22 m on 26 January 2007. The age of the ice core bottom was 720,000 years.
In response to IPICS 'OLDEST ICE‘, the third deep ice coring project is underway to obtain ice cores older than 800,000 years. We are currently developing and producing a new deep drill system. Various problems that were encountered in...
To drill through ice and bedrock, Antarctic Subglacial Drilling Rig (ASDR) with a new, modified version of the cable-suspended Ice and Bedrock Electromechanical Drill (IBED) have been developed in Jilin University. The drilling facilities are divided into two groups: those associated with the movable drilling shelter and those associated with the movable workshop. The drilling winch, control...
The record of past atmospheric gases preserved in ice at the “DE08” site, located 16 km east of the summit of Law Dome, East Antarctica, has been the subject of analysis since the late 1980s. Three ice coring projects have been completed at this location, all exploiting the benefits of high local snowfall rates—1.2 m ice eq. a-1 at DE08. Such snow accumulation rapidly traps gases, resulting in...
We conducted a 90.45 m ice core drilling in a high accumulation area of the southeastern Greenland Ice Sheet in 2015. The drilling site (SE-Dome; 67.81°N, 36.37°W, 3170m a.s.l.) is located 185km north of the Tasiilaq. We used a helicopter, Bell 212 for transportation. Two and two flights of Bell 212 were required to fly in and out SE-Dome. We used a light weight of electromechanical drill...
Rapid ice coring is one of the most important means of the polar scientific research, which is of great significance for research of earth system science. However, rapid ice core drilling technology and equipment is a bottleneck of the polar scientific research under the polar extremely harsh and cruel work condition. The conventional polar ice core drilling equipment work effectively in a...
Rapid drilling of an access hole in ice sheets can complement the prospection of potential deep drilling sites and serve to locally explore an ice sheet. RADIX is a rapid access system for an access hole of 20 mm diameter optimized for minimal resources and logistics demand. It is based on a coiled drilling system. The drilled ice cuttings are available for analysis. The drilling speed is...
The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) Rapid Access Isotope Drill (RAID) is an innovative new class of electromechanical ice drill, which has recently been used to drill the deepest dry hole drilled by an electromechanical drill. The record breaking depth of 461.58m was drilled in just over 104 hours at Little Dome C. The drill is described as well as modifications since it was last used. Borehole...
Significant upgrades to the Rapid Air Movement (RAM) Drill were developed and tested in 2018 by the U.S. Ice Drilling Program (IDP) for the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). The design of the system leverages the existing infrastructure of the RAM Drill to greatly reduce the logistical burden of deploying the drill while maintaining the ability to drill an access hole in firn and ice to...
The hot-water deep-drilling project at Amery Ice Shelf, East Antarctica, employs a multidisciplinary approach to the study of the region. It has been planned to drill 10–12 holes from the edge of the ice shelf to the grounding zone up to a depth of 2100 m at intervals of nearly 50 km. All equipment are installed in 20 standard shipping containers and will be transported from site to site...
Oldest ice with a potential climate record over 1.2Ma on Earth has significance in revealing reasons of Middle Pleistocene Transition (MPT, occurred between ~0.9 – 1.2 Ma ago). The deep ice core at Dome C provided us the longest and high resolution record of paleo-climatic change in the past of 0.8Ma with eight glacial cycles, but it’s not long enough to infer what caused the earth’s glacial...
Ice core handling comes with many challenges, especially in the brittle ice zone. Here we present a technique to process longitudinally broken ice pieces (slant breaks) for continuous flow analysis (CFA). This technique involves shaving ice either side of the break (slant or normal) and refitting the pieces before melting them, instead of cutting out the slanted break and creating a...
We will present the results of a field campaign planned in September 2019.
The goal is to drill 5 holes (250m deep) with a new hot water drill system. Hole will be equipped with a inclinometer string an piezometer
Most of complications during ice coring related to: 1) selection of a drilling technology, drilling protocol, and operators mistake 2) selection of drilling site and time of the year, 3) drill performance at specific conditions 4) unforeseen drilling conditions, 5) drilling system malfunction.
Presented materials describe problems that were observed during dry borehole (BH) shallow depth...
A fibre-optic Distributed Temperature Sensing (DTS) instrument has been deployed into a number of ice boreholes in order to measure the temperature profile. The advantage of the DTS is that glass in the fibre itself becomes the temperature sensor and a relatively cheap length of fibre-optic cable can be used to measure temperature continuously along its length. As temperatures are measured...
Various thermal and electromechanical ice drills are suspended on armored cable that provide power to the downhole unit and transmit signals to the surface. As a general matter, steel wire armored cables are used. These cables have usually 4 to 7 conductors and outer diameter in the range of 4.5-9 mm. The weight of such cables is 0.09-0.35 kg/m and maximum bending radius (under tension)of the...
The success of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) BEAMISH project in 2018-19 demonstrated the viability of the BEAMISH hot water drill (HWD) system in creating access holes through over 2150m of the Rutford Ice Stream. The proven ability to gain access to subglacial environments at depths exceeding 2 km opens the way to accessing subglacial lake targets. The identification of such a target by...
To this day, there exists a technology gap for drilling to intermediate depth between 30 and 100m. While conventional, manual operated augers are increasingly cumbersome to operate at greater depth, deploying a full sized mechanical rig or a hot water drill is often not feasible for more shallow ice regions due to budget and logistic restraints.
We present a lightweight and self-contained...
Within TRIPLE, initiated by the DLR Space Administration, Technologies for Rapid Ice Penetration and subglacial Lake Exploration are being researched. The TRIPLE scenario is divided into three components and aims to explore the subglacial ocean of the Jovian moon Europa. The first component is a melting probe which penetrates the icy shield and navigates to the ocean below. It anchors itself...
Two drills capable of coring rock beneath ice have been developed by the U.S. Ice Drilling Program (IDP) for the U.S. National Science Foundation. The design of the systems leverages existing exploration drilling equipment to create drills capable of recovering ice and rock core. The Agile Sub-Ice Geological (ASIG) Drill is capable of collecting ice cores at any target depth and up to 10...
This paper analyzes the problems of evaluating, refurbishing and updating drill equipment, specifically the IceCube EHWD drill, which has been in long term storage for years and is needed to be put into service for an upcoming project.
The approach developed was to prioritize tasks, into five categories: with the highest priority on bringing back as many experienced team members from...
During EastGRIP season 2017 we observed a rapidly growing borehole inclination, which culminated at ≈ 5,5° in a depth of 550m. In order to correct for this inclination a leaf spring was mounted on the outer glass fiber core barrel, near the drill head of our 2-m core-barrel version of the Hans Tausen Drill to provide a sideways force as close to the cutters as possible. To rectify the...
Authors: Carson McAfee, Sean Quirk, Keith Makinson, Julius Rix, Paul Anker and Alex Brisbourne
Abstract:
A programmable borehole measurement system was deployed in hot water drilled ice holes during the BEAMISH project to drill to the bed of the Rutford Ice Stream in Antarctica. Capable of operating remotely, this system reached depths of 2150 meters and measured hole diameter, depth and...
Mass loss of ice shelf is of great significance to a better understanding of the ice sheet dynamics and a more precise prediction of global sea levels. However, the melting processes and ocean currents beneath the ice shelf remain poorly understood. The hot water drill, a highly efficient drill technique, provides an opportunity to investigate the physical and chemical processes beneath the...
To date, more than 400 relatively small subglacial reservoirs and several large lakes were discovered in Antarctica. Certainly subglacial lakes exist in Greenland. In recent years, different approaches were taken to access and directly sample subglacial water environments. RECoverable Autonomous Sonde (RECAS) allows to access subglacial lake when water remains isolated from the modern ice...
Core sampling from beneath Antarctic subglacial environments offers unique opportunities for examining processes acting of overlying ice. Basal aquatic sediment materials contain important paleo-climatic and paleo-environmental records even more than ice cores, provide unique habitat for life, give significant interactive information between ice bottom, subglacial hydraulic system and the...
Abstract
Much of the direct geological evidence for the instability of Antarctica’s ice sheets and shelves in past warmer climate regimes is now hidden beneath thick floating and grounded ice. The ANDRILL project showed the scientific rewards of deep geological drilling through the Ross Ice shelf, but was on a logistical (>250 tonnes of equipment) and financial (USD30M) scale that is not...
Since 1975 about dozen of dry hole electromechanical (EM) ice coring drills were developed. Most of the drills were used in polar regions and a few in polar and high altitude glaciers ice coring operations. Main differences between ice coring operations in polar regions and in high altitude glaciers are: logistics, air and ice temperatures, particles concentration in ice and physical...
High production rate ice coring systems allow for fast ice sampling in intermediate depths. Several ice coring operations in Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets and in high altitude glaciers demonstrate ability of the dry hole electromechanical (EM) ice coring drills rich depth of a few hundred meters in a short time. The highest average production drilling rate (aPDR) of 4.79 m/h in 310 m...
The electronics of the JARE deep drill was previously manufactured through outsourcing and its basic design has already spent quarter century. The electronics of the drill should be installed in the pressure chamber. This implies that size of the electronics is restricted as smaller and difficult to manufacture. Therefore, it needs to be customized by incorporating and the required...
Data communication between the surface and the drill computer is necessary for deep ice core drilling. The contact force, inclination, and temperature of the drill are important for the drilling operation. These values were measured using the sensors in the drill and transmitted to the surface computer through the winch cable. The winch cable, which is 3000 m or more in length for enabling the...
The upcoming deep ice-coring project Beyond EPICA Oldest Ice (BE-OI) in Antarctica requires a robust and capable electrical drive-chain. The design goal was to increase the useable mechanical power of the drill motor as well as the data transfer between the surface and the downhole section by keeping the system as compatible as possible to existing dill systems.
The system consists of a...
For the recovery and reuse of drilling fluid from the chips produced in ice core drilling a melting procedure has been introduced at the EGRIP, RECAP, and ABN projects. The aim is to maximize the efficiency of drill fluid recovery through complete separation of the drilling fluid from liquid water, which would be an improvement over traditional methods relying on centrifugal force for fluid...
The control system for ice coring drills present many design challenges due to the harsh environments in which the components must operate. This is further complicated by the need to send power and communicate over long winch cables with small conductors. An increasing amount of components can be purchased off-the-shelf, however custom electronics are still often required to provide...
Recent evidence reveals that a large number of subglacial lakes exist beneath the Antarctic ice sheet. Exploring the subglacial lake is of great interest to the science community. RECoverable Autonomous Sonde (RECAS) will provide an exploration tool to measure and sample the subglacial lake environments while the subglacial lake remains isolated from the glacier surface and atmosphere. The...
Bench tests of core drilling in ice with various filling liquids were performed during the seasonal shift period of the 64th Russian Antarctic Expedition (December 2018 - January 2019) with the use of Borehole 5G drilling facilities. Experimental studies were done using the test bench developed at the St.Petersburg Mining University, that was first applied in 1994 prior to drilling Borehole G5...
Monitoring the tension in cables is significant in some ice drill and deep water applications. Take our RECoverable Autonomous Sonde (RECAS) for example. It is able to melt a hole to ice sheet bottom and is able to move upwards. A winch is installed inside RECAS to release and recover the cable, whose tension needs to be monitored in real time in order to control the behavior of the winch. As...
Introduction: Europa is a primary target in the search for past or present life because it is potentially geologically active and likely possesses a deep global ocean in contact with a rocky core underneath its outer ice shell. Theory and observation indicate that the icy surface shell is approximately 3-30 km thick, depending on models [1, 2].
Reaching Europa Ocean: To reach the subsurface...
Comparing with conventional ice core drilling method, laser ice drilling falls in the category of a new clean drilling technology involving innovative kind of non-mechanical physical ice destruction . High energy laser beam is applied to the surface of ice directly, and the ice is heated and melted rapidly. Laser drilling technology has been developed promptly by virtue of high penetration...
We present the results of laboratory and field tests of several new technologies developed at Stone Aerospace during the past five years in response to NASA needs to advance technology readiness levels for planetary missions to icy Ocean Worlds. Each of the approaches we present were developed in response to a common problem: emulating a nuclear power source that will be used on a flight...
Recent evidence reveals that a large number of subglacial lakes exist beneath the Antarctic ice sheet. Exploring the subglacial lake is of great interest to the science community. RECoverable Autonomous Sonde (RECAS) will provide an exploration tool to measure and sample the subglacial lake environments while the subglacial lake remains isolated from the glacier surface and atmosphere. This...
Accurate and reliable near-surface temperature is a critical input factor in ice model for assessing the mass and energy balance of polar ice sheet. Using a 10m temperature chain installed at Taishan station during the 2015/2016 Chinese Antarctic Research Expedition, a vertical profile of the high-precision near-surface snow temperature spaced at 0.1 m was obtained. The temperature dataset is...
