After encountering water at about 70 meters depth within the glacier, we made it about another 10 slushy meters with the electro-mechanical drill before switching over to a thermal drill. Rather than spin an auger through the ice to retrieve a core, this drill melts its way down by capturing a core within a barrel with a hot ring at the tip. Switching over between systems is normally a cumbersome process which requires cutting a cable and resoldering a bunch of connections – each time the switch is made. For this trip, however, someone had craftily created an adapter cable which would have eliminated the soldering, except that the wrong plug had been attached at one end. This required using an unnecessary part of the electro-mechanical drill to further adapt the systems without soldering. All this seemed to work fine for about 10 meters, at which point a short occurred in the system and progress stopped short. Fortunately the drill did not get stuck in the hole, but most of an afternoon was spent diagnosing the problem and eliminating variables. This morning the last possibility was tested, the problem identified, and a lot of soldering done to fix it.


Bella overseeing Terry’s heat shrinking of the new connections.


Bella giving the finished connection a final look before sending it down the hole.

Drilling then proceeding smoothly throughout the day, do a depth of about 93 meters. At about 90 meters, we hit more than a meter of what seemed to be clear regelation ice. If true, this ice was not formed by compaction of snow layers, but rather the refreezing of liquid water, like the same way that ice cubes in your freezer form. That this type of ice exists here implies two things – that some time in the past liquid water existed here and that enough energy was available to refreeze it. The latter implies ice temperatures at that time that were below freezing, giving the heat energy released by freezing the liquid water a place to go. This could have happened 100 years ago, or yesterday, as far as we can tell just by looking at it. But there was also some debris in the core which may contain bacteria or other living things that can help us constrain the date.


You can tell something interesting has just come out of the hole when the crowd gathers with cameras.


Ryo using his microscope camera to photograph the core.


A fairly clear core.


A section of clear ice with no bubbles.


A section of clear ice with some bubble layers.