Abstract
AbstractOver the course of the 2014/15 and 2015/16 austral summer seasons, the South Pole Ice Core project recovered a 1751 m deep ice core at the South Pole. This core provided a high-resolution record of paleoclimate conditions in East Antarctica during the Holocene and late Pleistocene. The drilling and core processing were completed using the new US Intermediate Depth Drill system, which was designed and built by the US Ice Drilling Program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In this paper, we present and discuss the setup, operation, and performance of the drill system.
Highlights
Supported by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), a 1751 m long ice core, dating more than 54 000 years into the past (Winski and others, 2019), was recovered by the South Pole Ice Core (SPICEcore) project at the South Pole
Since completion of the SPICEcore project, Ice Drilling Program (IDP) has been developing a suite of drills that are based on the same sonde design but with various features based on hole depth
During the 2013/14 season and in preparation for the SPICEcore project, Antarctic Program Support Contractor (ASC) excavated, backfilled, and compacted a 91 m × 91 m × 1.5 m deep pad centered on the borehole location
Summary
Supported by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), a 1751 m long ice core, dating more than 54 000 years into the past (Winski and others, 2019), was recovered by the South Pole Ice Core (SPICEcore) project at the South Pole. Drilling resumed the following 2015/16 austral summer season and the final borehole depth of 1751 m was reached in time to start packing the drill system by the end of the season. The US Intermediate Depth Drill (IDD) system was designed and built by the US Ice Drilling Program (IDP) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (Johnson and others, 2014). Since completion of the SPICEcore project, IDP has been developing a suite of drills that are based on the same sonde design but with various features based on hole depth. The differences include the various length of core barrels and instrument packages This suite of drills has been given the base name of Foro, which is a Latin word meaning to bore or make a hole. Details of how the ice cores were handled, logged and retrograded back to the USA are described in Souney and others (2020)
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