WorldWide Drilling Resource

It’s All About the Ice Adapted from a Press Release by Antarctic Glaciers In the frozen landscape of Antarctica, there is a drilling operation trying to get to the oldest ice cores. To get down to the oldest ice, the ice cores must be drilled near the ice divide located in the center of the ice sheet. This is no small feat for researchers because the ice divide is far from the research bases and ocean, which makes it some- what difficult to get the large number of people to the drill site. For this particular project led by a group of New Zealand scientists, it took several flights and waiting weeks for the weather to improve for the 12-person multinational team to make it from Scott Base to the Roosevelt Island drill site. The island is an ice dome, and the ice is grounded on a muddy bedrock approximately 650 feet below sea level. The dome was naturally built over tens of thousands of years as snow slowly accumulated. The ice built up in annual layers which are flat and easy to interpret. Stable ice flow at the island’s summit over the past few thousands of years has brought older ice layers closer to the surface. By conservative estimates, some of the bedrock near the surface should be up to 40,000 years old. Roosevelt Island is surrounded by the Ross Ice Shelf, which is a block of ice roughly the size of France and is floating on the Ross Sea. This is important to the Photo of the whole team after a day of drilling courtesy of N. Bertler. It’s All About the Ice cont’d on page 48. 36 JUNE 2017 WorldWide Drilling Resource ®