Description
Chairs:
Professor Kuniko Goto-Azuma and Engineer Jay Johnson
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 ICEโ, 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 โDE08โ 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 ratesโ1.2 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; 67.81ยฐN, 36.37ยฐW, 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 10โ12 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๏ข 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 โ 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 itโs not long enough to infer what caused the earthโs 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...
