Ice core drilling is underway
Week of 12/12/22
By Peter Neff
Weather finally broke for a few days this week at the Allan Hills, allowing all cargo to be delivered for COLDEX I-188 ground radar team early in the week. The relatively calm weather also gave the I-165 ice coring team time to set up their two US Ice Drilling Program ice core drill tents, meaning this camp is now nearly weatherproof and ready to collect cores. Indeed, by Thursday December 15, drilling with the large-diameter Blue Ice Drill (BID) already reached 50 meters depth. The team began a second drilling operation with the Foro drill late in the week, and had reaccessed a previously drilled hole to ~120 m by early December 17. They plan to have 12 ice core boxes (BID quarter cores cut with bandsaw) to send to McMurdo on December 21. Nearby, I-188 is now fully equipped with cargo and snow machines and has initiated radar surveys in the Allan Hills accumulation zone, including completing six ApRES (phase-sensitive radar) measurements. UW graduate student John-Morgan Manos also collected a distributed temperature sensing (DTS) measurement down an old ice core borehole near the I-165 camp, and the team has been back and forth to I-165 camp several times in recent days. The teams may share Christmas dinner together—I-165 plans to continue work until the afternoon of Dec. 24, taking all of Dec. 25 off for the holiday. Both teams have been allowed more field time, likely with most team members staying out into the week ending January 14, but this plan is subject to change.
Back in McMurdo, Peter gave the Crary Lab science lecture on December 14, sharing about COLDEX with a full audience in the library. The I-185 airborne geophysics team has been working long hours to test the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) suite of radar, gravity, and magnetic instruments installed in the Basler MKB (see preliminary radar echogram from Allan Hills below). Two test flights were flown this week, bringing the total to three flights with equipment operating normally. All cargo arrived at Willy field by late in the week, and the University of Kansas (KU) team are hard at work wiring the new COLDEX UHF radar after mounting it on the aircraft December 16. The teams are likely to begin test flights including the KU radar as early as December 19, before entering isolation and heading to South Pole just after the Christmas holiday weekend and flying survey routes through much of January.
Blue Ice Drill tent at the Allan Hills from the air December 12, 2022. Photo Allen Pope.
The I-165 and I-188 teams catch up in the BID tent at Allan Hills. Photo Allen Pope.
Preliminary radar data from the I-185 overflight of the Allan Hills blue ice area. Image Duncan Young / UTIG.
