Core Drilling in Greenland’s Ice Sheet Adapted from Information by the State University of New York, University at Buffalo The State University of New York, University at Buffalo (UB) is coleading GreenDrill, a project researching Greenland’s Ice Sheet, investigating one of the planet’s largest unexplored frontiers: the bedrock beneath the ice. The goal is to collect bedrock cores from several locations in northern Greenland in an effort to discover new details about the history of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Questions such as: Did ice in northern Greenland disappear completely during periods of warmth about 400,000 and 100,000 years ago? How sensitive is the northern portion of the ice sheet to temperature change? The research, along with findings from other studies, could also help scientists figure out when the entire Greenland Ice Sheet last melted away and improve predictions of how much global sea levels will rise in the 21st century as ice sheets shrink. “There are periods in geological history where the Greenland Ice Sheet was smaller than it was today, and we don’t have a lot of tools available to find out how small it was. One thing we’ve always wanted to do is lift up the ice sheet and look at the bedrock below for clues about the ice sheet’s past configuration. We can’t do that, but we can drill through the ice to get samples from down there. Those samples could tell us when these areas were last ice-free,” explained Jason Briner, professor of geology in the UB College of Arts and Sciences and one of the coleaders of the project. Researcher Chester “Chet” Langway joined UB in the 1970s as a geology professor and was a pioneer in deep ice drilling and science in Greenland. The GreenDrill project returns Buffalo to a lead role in ice drilling, opening exciting new opportunities for students in field and lab work. “UB will be back on Greenland, drilling through the ice,” Briner said. “I just think that’s so cool.” Briner will join other GreenDrill scientists in Greenland in 2021, to pinpoint precise locations for drilling. The selection of drill sites for the project which will include four separate areas of northern Greenland. In each location, teams will recover bedrock from three sites, two on the ice sheet itself and one from ice-free land near the edge of the ice sheet. If everything goes as planned, drilling will begin in 2022. Researchers, including Briner and his students, plan to camp on-site to complete their tasks including sample collection. In addition to bedrock, the team plans to bring back basal ice, which is the ice found at the bottom of the ice sheet, and sediments. In addition to Jason Briner, the $7 million project is being coled by Joerg Schaefer, research professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO). The leadership team also includes Gisela Winckler, research professor, and Nicolás Young, associate research professor, both from LDEO; Robert DeConto, professor of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; and Sridhar Anandakrishnan, professor of geosciences at Penn State. 62 DECEMBER 2020 WorldWide Drilling Resource ® ENV Scientists heading to Greenland will be studying the bedrock below the Greenland Ice Sheet. Drilling for core samples will take place at four different locations. The project is being funded by the National Science Foundation.
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