After years of planning, failures, and considerable efforts, we have finally extracted the first section of our deep ice core from McCall Glacier. Ice cores from glaciers around the world provide the best record of climate over the past 100 to 100,000 years. No other sources of information provide such long-term, high temporal-resolution or accurate information on climate. McCall Glacier sits inside of essentially a black hole of climate information -- there are neither long-term weather station records nor proxy paleo-climate records in this large region of the Arctic. The ice on McCall Glacier is several hundred years old, and in each of those years clues as to what the weather was like that year get trapped within a layer of snow, which then gets buried by the next year’s layer. Over time, these layers get compressed into glacier ice and seal those clues into place, for us to discover by extracting cores.

Our coring drill is owned and operated by the good folks at ICDS in Madison Wisconsin, who drill ice cores all around the world for academic purposes. Bella and Terry from ICDS have joined us for this expedition to operate the drill and extract the cores. The drill is an electro-mechanical drill, which operates by first lowering down a motor and core barrel into the hole using a large winch and thick cable. The cable carries current to power the motor, which spins the core barrel within the hole and drills down about a meter at a time. The motor and core barrel are then hauled up by the winch, and the core barrel removed from the motor section and placed on an analysis table where we take a look at it before placing it into a plastic bag. The bag is labeled with the depth, location, and which way is up, so they can be analyzed in detail later in the correct chronological order. It’s a pretty efficient process once everything is up and running.


Bella, driving.


The ice core, still in the core barrel.


High-tech core extraction from the barrel…


Catching the core as it comes out.


Don’t let it fall off the table!


An extracted core. This one was from the firn area, and you can clear see alternating layers of old snow and ice. The ice was likely not formed by compaction, but rather refreezing of surface meltwater that dripped down into the snow.


Bagging and marking the core, so we remember which piece went where – they mostly all look alike!

So within 5 days of leaving Fairbanks, we had already extracted 27 meters of core. This was another remarkable achievement, and one that may be deceivingly simple on the surface considering how smoothly this trip has gone so far. Our first coring attempt was in 2004, with colleagues from Japan. Unfortunately, a helicopter accident destroyed this drill before we were able to use it, and on that trip we were only able to drill 20 meters using a hand auger. This ice was later destroyed by an earthquake which leveled the storage facility in Japan. That expedition took more than year of planning and preparation, and its taken another 4 years to recover from it, which entailed securing new funding, new drills, new personnel, etc etc. So to recover 27 meters of ice now represents the fruition of years of hard work and the payoff of years of heartache and heartburn. We can only go down from here!


About 27 meters of core, bagged, tagged, and staying chilled in our custom freezer box.