A Review of the Dry Valley Drilling Project, 1971–76

Abstract

The Dry Valleys of southern Victoria Land, Antarctica, lying some 75 km west of McMurdo station, form an arid, ice-free area of roughly 2 500 km2. Since the late 1950s, this region has provided a remarkable opportunity for geoscientific studies of the exposed surface rocks, within easy reach of logistic support at McMurdo and Scott bases on Ross Island (Fig 1). As a result of a study of Lake Vanda in the Wright Valley, which began during the 1963–64 summer field season, scientists from the United States, New Zealand and Japan supported the view that further advances in our knowledge of the Dry Valleys would require an examination of the unconsolidated material, and the geothermal regime at lake sites, using direct shallow drilling techniques. As drilling techniques and interestin the geological history of the McMurdo region as a whole (encompassing the Transantarctic Mountains, Ross Island, McMurdo Sound and the Dry Valleys) developed, an international, multidisciplinary project—the Dry Valley Drilling Project (DVDP)—was conceived. By 1969 the US National Science Foundation (NSF) had decided to coordinate proposals from scientists wishing to drill the first intermediate and deep cores into the sediment and rock of Antarctica; the aim, a reconstruction of Antarctic geological history that traditional surface or near-surface studies alone could never achieve. Initially, the approach was to be a sub-surface physical, chemical and biological examination of theDry Valleys, but as the project developed it encompassed studies of the Ross Island volcanic complex and McMurdo Sound sediments.