This contribution will give an overview about the workflow in handling, processing and data management of ice cores drilled over the last decades under logistic support of AWI. Since drill campaigns at remote polar sites are associated with high personell efforts and high financial costs a thorough curation is desirable and a prerequisite for successful ice core research. In its best sense, a...
This presentation provides an overview of the ice core workflow – from logging and processing in the field, (long-term) storage at Concordia station, transport to the Antarctic coast, shipping at temperatures below –50°C, storage and handling in the curational ice core stores in Europe to running a dedicated processing in the ice laboratories at AWI. We will focus on the infrastructure and...
At Dome Fuji in East Antarctica, deep ice coring projects have been conducted three times over the past three decades. The first core (DF1) was drilled between 1992 and 1998, reaching a depth of 2,503 m (Watanabe et al., 2003). The second core (DF2), which extended to 3,035 m and nearly reached the ice sheet bed, was drilled between 2004 and 2007 at a location 44 m from the DF1 borehole...
Ice core drilling campaigns require careful planning to optimise field operations while continuously refining strategies throughout the season to navigate logistical challenges. CoreCaster is a Python-based simulation tool designed to forecast drilling progress under both idealised and probabilistic conditions. Developed in the field during the Beyond EPICA Oldest Ice Core drilling campaign,...
The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have recently undertaken numerous ice drilling projects, including the first phase of the multi-year REWIND project. This project proposes to drill through the Antarctic Peninsula ice sheet to bedrock, retrieving an ice core from the entire depth of approximately 716 m using the BAS shallow and intermediate ice core drills. The principal scientific objective...
Rapid penetration through Antarctic ice sheets to directly recover subglacial bedrock core and samples for cosmogenic nuclide and mineralogical analyses holds critical significance in advancing research on Antarctic geological structures, reconstructing ice sheet evolution history, and evaluating future climate change. Current drilling technologies face substantial challenges under...
The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Ice Drilling Program (IDP) has upgraded two Winkie diamond coring drills for agile subglacial coring in polar environments. Over the past five years, the IDP Winkie Drills have been used in three subglacial coring campaigns in West Antarctica at Mt. Murphy, in the Hudson Mountains, and at Mt. Waesche. This presentation will detail the drilling lessons...
A subglacial rock coring project called GreenDrill was completed over the course of two Greenland summer field seasons starting in 2023 and completing in 2024. The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Ice Drilling Program (IDP) supported this project with two subglacial coring drill systems: the Agile Sub-Ice Geological (ASIG) Drill and the Winkie Drill. The ASIG Drill was used the first...
The exploration of the subglacial geological environment represents a pivotal frontier in Antarctic scientific research, offering crucial insights into the Earth's cryosphere and its role in global climate systems. In 2023, a collaborative scientific initiative was launched among Jilin University, China University of Geosciences (Beijing), and VNIIOkeangeologia. This partnership aimed to...
Subglacial bedrock, buried beneath polar ice sheet, is important for the study of the historical evolution of ice sheets, revealing geological tectonics and paleoclimate. However, the sampling of subglacial bedrock is extremely difficult in technology and logistics. At present, only several subglacial bedrocks have been sampled from polar regions.
China is developing a muti-process drilling...
Small pieces of rock and sediment found at the base of ice cores can be used to reconstruct the first appearance, evolution, and age of ice sheets, as well as the vegetation that existed prior to ice-sheet formation. However, accurate reconstructions, particularly those based on luminescence dating methods for determining burial ages, require that these materials remain unexposed to light...
Prime targets in the search for extraterrestrial life are the subsurface oceans of icy moons in the outer Solar System (Klenner 2024), particularly Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus. Future space missions to explore these ocean worlds are of great interest, and a proposed mission scenario includes landing on the surface, penetrating through the massive ice shell with a melting...
INCLINOMETER APPLICATIONS USING ENCAPSULATED ACCELEROMETER DATA CALIBRATED FOR VARYING MEGAPASCAL PRESSURE AND CRYO-TEMPERATURE CONDITIONS
Mohammad Vafadarmianvelayat¹², Matthias Hüther¹, Johannes Lemburg¹, and Frank Wilhelms¹³ ¹Alfred-Wegener-Institut Helmholtz-Zentrum für Polar- und Meeresforschung, Bremerhaven, Germany
²Georg August University of Göttingen, Department of Geoscience,...
It has proven to have great importance to be able to monitor parameters down though a borehole in connection with an ice core drilling project. The measurements can support the drilling during the ice core drilling by monitoring the borehole diameter, temperature, inclination and borehole shape. After the ice core has been drilled borehole measurements can be used for precise temperature...
We report on the successful test of a new replicate drilling system for ice cores. The test was done in drill fluid, at 140 m depth of the EastGRIP borehole in central Greenland.
To drill a replicate ice core with the Danish Replicate Drilling System, three steps need to be done. First, we determine the orientation of the borehole, to drill the replicate core on the “downhill” side of the...
The European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA) Beyond EPICA – Oldest Ice aims at retrieving a continuous ice core record of climate feedback and forcing spanning about 1.5 Ma back in time. In that period the cyclicity of glacial/interglacial changes in continental ice sheet volume and temperature changed from 40 ka to the well-known 100 ka cycles encountered over the last 800 ka....
From late March to late May 2025, a collaboration between Canada and Denmark drilled a 613m ice core through the Muller ice cap in the high Canadian Arctic. It is the deepest ice core in the Americas to date. The ice cap is in close proximity to the Arctic Ocean, supporting the primary goal of understanding the evolution of Arctic sea ice over the 10,000+ year record contained within the...
This presentation is a concise collage of technical innovations and their usefulness in the latest field seasons of the Beyond Epica Oldest Ice drilling project. Improvements were made with the following newly developed equipment:
• Replacement drill-head for filtering of the borehole.
• Fine slush filtering with the drills shaft within the chip chamber.
• Daily maintenance...
Techniques for ice core drilling on polar ice sheets and high-altitude ice caps have been developed and improved by many research groups over the past 60 years, as a means of retrieving records of past climate change and atmospheric composition. Less attention has been given to the natural archives that may be present in temperate ice caps and their physical properties are still poorly...
This presentation addresses the requirements and design considerations for an open and pressure-tolerant cycloidal gearbox. Electric motors often require reduction gears to achieve sufficient torque at the output shaft at comparably low speeds. Conventional gearbox designs feature closed compartments with static and dynamic seals to contain the oil or grease required for bearings and the teeth...
Transporting and collecting ice cuttings generated by the drill head is a necessary task for an ice-core drill. In boreholes stabilised by liquids, such as the one in Little Dome C in Antarctica as part of the BEOI project, this collection process can be enhanced by the use of pump devices placed between the core barrel and the chip collection chamber.
This presentation will showcase a newly...
Specialised test equipment is frequently required during the design and verification phases of a project. However, this equipment is often expensive, not always readily available at the time, or just time-consuming to use. This can result in reliance on systems that have not been adequately tested prior to field campaigns. This may lead to system failures or substandard designs.
This newly...
This presentation will provide a comprehensive overview of the development process of the power train and drive chain of a deep ice core drill, with particular emphasis on the challenges encountered during the project.
The covered deep ice coring drill system is of the type of the commonly used cable-suspended electro-mechanical ice-core drill. In such systems, the electrical power and...
Sometimes maybe more on the conservative side then cutting-edge a well-adjusted drillhead is one of the keys to a successful drill-run. Setting up the next drillhead is mainly based on what has proved to be working – or not working - during the last runs, but also on the conditions to be expected next.
This presentation will dive into the different types of cutters and shoes used during the...
Drilling deep ice cores is an undertaking that is rarely carried out, due to the time-consuming nature of such projects. The key contributing factors to the project timeframe are the remote locations with limited access, and the sequential sampling nature of typical coring technologies. The most significant lever that can be influenced is the reduction of travel time between the surface and...
At EGRIP an ice core was collected to 2663.63 m below the surface of the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream (NEGIS) using the latest modifications of the drill based on the Danish Hans Tausen (HT) concept (Johnsen et al., 2007). The end of the drilling at EGRIP was highlighted by penetration into the subglacial environment upon which wet sedimentary material was collected using a custom adaptation...
Following a call by U.S. scientists in the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Ice Drilling Program (IDP) Long Range Science Plan, IDP undertook the design and fabrication of a new ice coring drill capable of 700 m depth but light enough for use in remote areas such as mountain glaciers. To minimize associated logistics, including the amount of drilling fluid and ice core boxes required,...
Deepening our understanding of million-year-scale climate evolution, particularly unraveling the mystery of the Mid-Pleistocene Transition (MPT), urgently requires obtaining older ice core records extending beyond current limitations (approximately 800,000 years), especially continuous climate archives reaching back 1.5 million years. While deep-sea sediments reveal the dominance of...
The Center for Oldest Ice Exploration (COLDEX) is one of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s (NSF) current, predominant scientific programs in Antarctica, and their recent work involves ice core drilling in very old and shallow (<200 m) ice, often entrained with silt and rocks. The silt and rocks quickly dull cutters, with the rocks also causing downhole hammering as the drill cuts through...
The Korea Polar Research Institute (KOPRI) has conducted extensive ice-penetrating radar (IPR) and seismic surveys across the David Glacier catchment in East Antarctica to identify subglacial lakes that are both scientifically promising and logistically accessible. These efforts led to the detailed characterization of Subglacial Lake Cheongsuk—an active lake approximately 50–80 m deep and 19...
Subglacial lakes and unexplored water reservoirs in the polar regions of Earth represent some of the most isolated and pristine environments known to science. Exploring these hidden ecosystems is of great significance not only for understanding our own planet, but also in the context of astrobiology and the search for life beyond Earth. Several celestial bodies in our solar system—such as...
Hot water drilling has the advantages of less environmental pollution and fast drilling speed, but due to the wide variety of ice surface equipment, there are problems such as complex coordinated control of multiple systems and difficulty in troubleshooting. This paper presents a centralized surface control system specifically designed for a polar hot water drilling, known as Deep Rapid Access...
For explore and sample subglacial lakes in polar regions, hot-water drilling has emerged as the most rapid and efficient penetration method（P. G. Talalay et al. 2024）. In a deep polar hot-water drilling system, the backwater system is an essential component , with the backwater cavity playing a pivotal role（Zhipeng Deng et al. 2025）. Located at a specific depth beneath the ice sheet surface,...
The Antarctic cold zone has given birth to a large number of closed subglacial lakes, and hundreds of subglacial lakes with large burial depths have been discovered, which may harbor unknown ancient life because they have been isolated from the outside world for millions of years. Subglacial lakes and sediments contain rich information on ice sheet evolution and paleoclimate. Therefore, the...
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory will be upgraded to include seven more strings of instrumentation at the South Pole during the 2025/26 austral summer season. Construction of the original IceCube detector required drilling boreholes ~60 cm in diameter to depths of 2500 m. The IceCube Upgrade Project again requires drilling boreholes that are approximately 60 cm in diameter, but now to depths...
The project aims to explore Subglacial Lake Qilin, located within long subglacial canyons in Princess Elizabeth Land, East Antarctica. This lake is ~42 km in length and has an area of 370 km2, making it one of the largest subglacial reservoirs in Antarctica (Yan et al. 2022). The lake is overlain with an average ice thickness of about 3600 m. The estimated maximal water thickness in the...
As part of the ERC Consolidator Grant project REASSESS, we have developed and successfully deployed a new hot water drilling system, the HWD700 (Hot Water Drill, 700 m capacity). The system is specifically designed to operate on land-terminating glaciers of the Greenland Ice Sheet, where surface meltwater is available and water recirculation is not required.
The design requirements focused...
Hot water drilling technology is a crucial method for exploring subglacial environments in polar regions. The winch and hose system form an essential component of the hot water drill, becoming increasingly critical as drilling depth increases. China discovered a large subglacial lake, whose buried depth is approximately 3600 meters, in the Princess Elizabeth Land through aerial ice radar...
Over the past six years, BAS Hot Water Drilling (HWD) systems have been successfully deployed across Antarctica in collaboration with several polar research operators. In 2019, the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC), a partnership between the UK and the US National Science Foundation (NSF), funded the drilling of access holes above and below the grounding line of Thwaites...
For nearly 50 years, hot water drilling has enabled direct access to and sampling of Antarctica’s subglacial environments, providing critical insights into basal and ocean processes, ice sheet dynamics, and sub-ice ecosystems. British Antarctic Survey (BAS) was among the early adopters of this technique to support oceanographic and glaciological research and has maintained a continuous...
Hot water drilling technology, characterized by high efficiency, minimal environmental disturbance, and rapid penetration, has become a key method for subglacial lake exploration in polar regions. However, current hot water drilling systems still face significant challenges in deep operations exceeding 4000 meters, such as long communication distances, real-time monitoring of borehole...
The BigRAID is a large diameter version of The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) Rapid Access Isotope Drill (RAID), whereas the original RAID was based around a 3-inch barrel and has cutters with an outer diameter of 85.2mm, the BigRAID has cutters with an outer diameter of 285mm. Both drills work on the same principle with full face twin cutters that create chippings which are then collected...
The Askaryan Radio Array (ARA) is a radio-based neutrino telescope that was constructed at the South Pole between the period of 2011 to 2018. Construction of the array required dry boreholes 18 cm in diameter to depths of 200 m to install the radio antenna instrumentation. The ARA Hot Water Drill (ARAHWD) was developed specifically for this task, and can achieve the required boreholes in 7 hr...
Current ice sheet evolution models have a very simple representation of glacial ice, and it is difficult to improve on this as there are a limited number of physical property measurements of glacial ice samples, particularly from locations where ice dynamics are important such as fast flowing ice and shear margins. To address this issue, we need samples that represent critical distinct ice...
The acquisition of polar ice cores is of great significance for researching global climate change, searching for ancient biological life forms, analyzing the characteristics of biogeochemical cycles, and revealing the evolutionary laws of glaciers and ice sheets. Currently, there are numerous challenges in polar ice core drilling. To address the bottleneck of low efficiency in traditional...
The Radio Neutrino Observatory in Greenland (RNO-G) is designed to detect ultra-high-energy neutrinos by capturing the radio signals generated when these rare particles interact with glacial ice. Located near Summit Station on the Greenland ice sheet, RNO-G will ultimately consist of 35 autonomous stations, each spaced 1.25 km apart and equipped with arrays of in-ice antennas. A key component...
The U.S. Rapid Access Ice Drill (RAID) is a new research drilling technology capable of quickly accessing the glacial bed of Antarctic ice sheets, retrieving deep ice core and rock core samples, providing boreholes for down-hole logging of physical properties, and creating long-term borehole observatories. The RAID platform can support deep ice-sheet reconnaissance for 1.5 million year-old or...
EGRIP camp was established in 2015 by packing down the former NEEM drilling camp and pulling all materials and structures, including the main building on ski to the EGRIP site by a 440 km traverse train. For the first time on the Greenland ice sheet, nothing was left behind, except for the borehole and 25 ton broken and buried timber roofs of the former underground trenches. At EGRIP all...
During the last 15 years there have been quite a few iteration steps in the process of developing a shallow icecore drilling sytem at AWI.
To keep up with mechanical and electrical changes of the key ingredients for the drilling process (like tower, winch, drill-unit..), to simplify logistics and due to optional further development several power supply and control units for the AWI shallow...
Ice drills have historically used “dumb” electronics systems where it is up to the operator to decide how to drive the drill, sometimes on the basis of minimal feedback data. While such systems can offer highly robust solutions which have performed steadily for decades, they sacrifice the operational efficiency possible with a partially automated “smart” system. This presentation will cover...
The Thermal Drill maintained by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Ice Drilling Program (IDP) was recently used for ice coring at high-altitude sites in both the northern and southern hemispheres. In 2022, researchers from the University of Maine and an IDP engineer/driller joined international colleagues in an ice coring effort on Quelccaya Ice Cap in Peru. In 2023, three IDP drillers...
