Freeze corer No. 3 for lake sediments

Abstract

Freezing of sediment in situ at the lake bottom using a freeze corer has become an important method for taking samples of soft sediments aimed for detailed stratigraphic analyses. Over the past decades a variety of freeze corers have been designed, from very simple metal tubes filled with dry ice that are dropped into the sediment to high-tech samplers using electric pumps, hydraulics and liquid nitrogen. The freeze corer described here is a compromise of getting good samples without a too complicated technique. It is designed for coring from lake ice, using a steel wire with a stopper on the ice to keep the corer in fixed position during freezing. It consists of a thermos connected to a thin freeze wedge (width 15 cm, length 100 cm, max thickness 6 cm). The dry ice is kept in the thermos until the freeze wedge has been lowered into the sediment to avoid water freezing on the wedge during descent through the water column; a wet steel-wedge surface disturbs the sediment stratigraphy less than a wedge on which rapid freezing occurs. The dry ice is kept in the thermos by a trapdoor that is opened by a messenger. When the trapdoor is opened the dry ice begins to drop into the wedge, which is filled with ethanol. This process continues concurrently with the consumption of ice in the wedge until the thermos is empty. Using 6–8 kg of dry ice and 4 l of ethanol (95%), a 3-cm-thick and up to 80-cm-long crust of frozen sediment is obtained in 20–25 min on each side of the wedge. The crust is easily detached intact from the wedge using a small volume of hot water, poured inside the wedge.