Ice coring

Deep core drilling into hard ice, and perhaps underlying bedrock, involves using a hollow drill which actively cuts a cylindrical pathway downward around the core.

Deep core drilling into hard ice, and perhaps underlying bedrock, involves using a hollow drill which actively cuts a cylindrical pathway downward around the core.

© Jean-Louis Tison (ULB)

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  • An ice core is a core sample of ice removed from a glacier, most commonly from the polar ice caps of Antarctica, Greenland or from high mountain glaciers elsewhere. As the ice forms from the incremental buildup of annual layers of snow, lower layers are older than upper, and an ice core contains ice formed over a range of years. The properties of the ice or inclusions within the ice can then be used to reconstruct a climatic record over the age range of the whole coring (from several thousands years in mountains glaciers up to 800 000 years in the Antarctic ice cap).
  • Ice cores contain an abundance of climate information. Inclusions in the snow of each year remain in the ice, such as wind-blown dust, ash, bubbles of atmospheric gas and radioactive substances. The variety of climatic proxies is greater than in any other natural recorder of climate, such as tree rings or sediment layers. These include proxies for temperature, ocean volume, precipitation, chemistry and gas composition of the lower atmosphere, volcanic eruptions, solar variability, sea-surface productivity, desert extent and forest fires.
  • How does it work?
  • How does it work?
  • A core is collected by separating it from the surrounding material. For material which is sufficiently soft, coring may be done with a hollow tube.
  • Deep core drilling into hard ice, and perhaps underlying bedrock, involves using a hollow drill which actively cuts a cylindrical pathway downward around the core.
  • Drill head and ice core
  • When a drill is used, the cutting apparatus is on the bottom end of a drill barrel, the tube which surrounds the core as the drill cuts downward around the edge of the cylindrical core.
  • The length of the drill barrel determines the maximum length of a core sample (6 m at GISP2 and Vostok). Collection of a long core record thus requires many cycles of lowering a drill/barrel assembly, cutting a core 4-6m in length, raising the assembly to the surface, emptying the core barrel, and preparing a drill/barrel for drilling. The length of the record depends on the depth of the ice core and varies from a few years up to 800 kyr for the EPICA core. The time resolution (i.e. the shortest time period which can be accurately distinguished) depends on the amount of annual snowfall, and dminishes with depth as the ice compacts under the weight of layers accumulating on top of it. Upper layers of ice in a core corresponds to a single year or sometimes a single season. Deeper into the ice the layers thin and annual layers become indistinguishable.
  • Top barrel and spiral

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Teacher Koen Meirlaen performs the experiment at the Princess Elisabeth station in Antarctica.

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