Happy Holidays from Antarctica!

Both COLDEX field teams are making excellent progress, with the Allan Hills team focusing on coring with the Blue Ice Drill and the airborne team arriving at South Pole, ready to start surveys.

Update from the Allan Hills Ice Coring Team

Ed Brook and Asmita Banerjee joined the field team by Twin Otter from McMurdo on Dec. 16 after a one-day delay for weather. The group is now at 10, including Emma and Ash (camp support staff who are doing excellent work), driller Elizabeth Morton (who is carrying forward with all of our drilling tasks after the departure of Mike Jayred), and Austin Carter, Sarah Shackleton, JM Manos, Julia Marks Peterson, Abby Hudak, Asmita, and Ed.

Drilling with the 24-cm diameter Blue Ice Drill (BID) continues at a site where a previous reconnaissance core (ALHIC-1902) indicated very old ice (4.5 million years) below 140 m depth. As of 12/22 the team had reached 86.7 m. The core was sampled continuously to 50 m, but deteriorating ice quality required moving to discontinuous discrete sampling, approximately 1 – 1kg sample per meter. The goal is to reach bedrock at this site, ~180-200 m. Drilling in the region known at the “Cul de Sac”, another area of known old ice, with the Eclipse (10 cm diameter) is still on hold at 89.3 m because the drill encountered several rocks and we decided to focus on the BID site.

Geophysical measurements, conducted by JM Manos, continue and are on track, including distributed temperature sensing in previous ice core boreholes and phase sensitive radar measurements for ice fabric investigations continue. Reconnaissance sampling using lightweight powered augers (to 15 m) and chainsaw trenching are also continuing on track. Ice core samples are being regularly returned to McMurdo and the team anticipates acceleration of ice core return over the next three weeks. Spirits are high, the whole group is working extremely hard, and the team is looking forward to a quick holiday break in a few days. This is my first trip to Allan Hills – the landscape is stunning, and we have had pretty good weather this week. - Update from Ed Brook, Director of COLDEX

*Photo shows the BID drill tent at the current site, with Mt. Brook (no relation) in the background.*

Update from the Airborne Team

This week COLDEX made the transition to Pole with a successful transit flight to South Pole by the survey aircraft MKB and Greg and Megan, going up Shackleton Glacier onto the East Antarctic Plateau and surveying down a recently deployed seismic node array, while the rest of the team got most of the way to Pole on an LC-130 before returning to base for operational reasons. The rest of the South Pole team was successful in arriving at Pole the following day, beginning a 5 day period of COVID social isolation. Our flight crew crew acclimatized over the next couple of days while we waiting for our cargo, before we launched our first survey flight to the west of last years survey on Friday. Our cargo continues to be delayed, however COLDEX inherits a key piece of advance technology from the International Polar Year era ICECAP project, designed for hopping between East Antarctic coastal stations - the Base Operations or BOP Bag, intended to carry everything required to process airborne data with a small footprint. With this, so long as nothing breaks we can continue surveying. - Update from Duncan Young, University of Texas faculty member and Science co-lead for base operations and flight planning for project I-185