On the occasion of the 31st Antarctic Treaty Consultative meeting held in Kiev, Ukraine, from the 2nd to the 13th of June 2008, SciencePoles looks at one of the lasting legacies of the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007-08: A series of high-tech scientific research stations recently completed, or in the process of being constructed in Antarctica. Never since the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58 has the frozen continent seen suc...

Camp is on a bit of a funny schedule, with half the folks working at night and the rest during the day. It feels like the issue we face all the time in Alaska, with considering the 4 hour time difference in the east coast. So we leave notes for each other to read when we wake up. This morning we got a note saying that the drill had hit a rock at 70 m and it could not get past it to drill the remaining 60 meters or so of ice. Most drills working on ice are not designed to penetrate rock, and this is certainly the case with the two types of drills we have here. For holes 2 and 3, our main scientific interest is just the hole itself, so that we can install a thermistor string into it to measure temperature. In my initial request for support (and several times afterwards), I had recommended th...

Click on the panorama and drag to look around, press Shift to zoom in, Command (Mac) or Control (PC) to zoom out. With the drill crew on the night shift, Jason, Kristin, Turner and I tried to keep things moving on the day shift. The morning began mostly by sorting through boxes, trying to organize stuff that had been disorganized by the move (or never organized in the first place). But by lunch time we were all headed up to the Upper Cirque. There we tried to do some ‘final’ sorting of gear for what needed to be left there to support Jason’s studies of internal accumulation and what should be brought to each of the 4 other cac...

By afternoon the day after moving to our new location, the drill was set up and the first cores taken. Unfortunately it was great, warm weather – nice for us, but not for the drilling as the cold cores kept freezing in the core barrel. So, having convinced ourselves that everything was functional, the Bella, Terry, Darek, and Ryo took naps so that they could begin drilling again after dinner when the air temperatures dropped. By about 9PM drilling recommenced, and at a rapid pace. The work flow was well thought out and everyone knew their role. By 4AM, ice at 25 meters depth had been extracted. At this rate, we’d be at the bottom in five days, and ready to move to our next site. ...

With the hole finished, the drill team lost no time in breaking down the drill and making it ready to transport downglacier to our next site. It was a beautiful morning, though a bit odd in that we essentially had blue skies and light snow. While the drill team packed, Jason assembled some GIS files to help us plot our next drilling location. We knew where we wanted it to within about 100 meters, but now it was time to choose THE spot. The purpose of this hole is to help us better understand the strange ice dynamics we observe here, about 5 kilometers down from our current location, by planting another thermistor string in the hole. We know from prior work that a substantial part of the ice surface motion we measure here is due to enhanced basal motion, meaning that the ice is either slidi...

The day started out clear and cold, and like normal we lowered our borehole camera into the hole to check the water level and look for salmon. The level was up substantially, to about 30 meters from the surface. Drilling proceeded throughout the day, with the usual amount of minor issues to solve, mostly related to water freezing on the drill. In anticipation of perhaps hitting the bottom sometime soon, Jason and I attached the data logger box, for the thermistor string we hope to install in the empty hole, onto the nearby weather station mast. After a number of other odd jobs throughout the day, I was on the phone with Ken in Fairbanks trying to troubleshoot our internet problems when Terry shouted that we had hit the bottom. Apparently the thermal drill hadn’t moved in q...

Progress continues to be made, but mild storms have slowed things down. The winds aren’t as strong as our first big storms, but they are strong enough that it makes drilling and logging more difficult than its worth. We began placing bets as to how thick the ice was here, but everyone lost the first round, fooled by the presence of water so early on. Now the bets lay in the 130-155m range. Bella demonstrating her technique for removing slush from the drill cable. Note the difference in apparent thickness of the cable above and below her gloves. ...