SWAIS2C has finished drilling at Crary Ice Rise (hole: SWAIS2C ICDP 5072_2_A), with an unprecedented 229 m of sediment core drilled. Following the end of rotary coring, Downhole Logger Arne Ulfers (LIAG Institute for Applied Geophysics), carried out logging down the hole with a spectral gamma radiation tool supplied by ICDP Operational Support Group, obtaining data that will help us understand the properties of the sediment. Pack-down is now underway, with the drill team pulling out more than 1300 metres of drill string and riser casing. We are thrilled with our success this season and are looking forward to working with the wider SWAIS2C science team to apply a wide range of disciplines to explore the information in this unique geological record of West Antarctic Ice Sheet history.
We have successfully drilled 200 metres of sediment core from beneath the ice sheet at Crary Ice Rise, reaching our target depth! This massive achievement is three seasons in the making, and many more years in the lead-up to our team reaching the ice. It's the culmination of the hard work of our large team of scientists, drillers, engineers and Antarctic logistics specialists. We’re excited about the science to come, and the insights about the past and future of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet waiting in the core, but for now we want to celebrate our drill team for delivering this technological feat. The pipe is still spinning - with a bit of time in the field up our sleeve, we’re not stopping drilling quite yet, as we continue to drill back through the geological archive hidden beneath the ice.
The SWAIS2C day shift awoke to fog today, making it hard to differentiate between the snow and the sky. It was a successful day’s drilling, with some long cores being pulled up.The team had to pause to relevel the Antarctic Intermediate Depth Drill rig. The rig sits on flitch beams, and with melt during some warm days, and the weight of the drill string, it had sunk a little into the firn (the snow layer at the top of the ice sheet). The team lifted the rig and added blocks to make everything level and ready to go again. It was also an opportunity to freshen up the snow around the rig to remove any icy patches and fill any holes. By the end of the day shift, depth drilled was 177.28 m.
Crary Ice Rise (ICDP SWAIS2C site 2) was clear and sunny, with little wind today. The weather was so pleasant that the drill team were down to short sleeves while the rig was in the sun! Drilling is continuing well, by the end of the day shift we had reached a drilled depth of 153.33 metres.
We’ve passed a huge milestone – we’ve now retrieved more than 100 metres of sediment core, so we are over halfway towards our target of 200 metres. Reaching this point is testimony to the skill and hard work of our drillers, who have managed some long runs pulling up cores of up to 3.1 m in length, and are delivering excellent recovery. The core that took us past 100 m was pulled during the night shift, a boost for the team who work their 12 hours while the drill rig is mostly in the shade, and deal with generally colder conditions.
Today a storm swept through the camp, with high winds of 35 kts gusting to 45 kts blowing snow and poor visibility for many hours. However, these tough conditions didn’t stop our drillers from continuing with their work, it was business as usual with a few extra layers. And with core coming up, our science team needed to be there to curate and process it, although fortunately the cold science tent is a little less exposed from the elements than the outside drill rig.
After several days of constant core coming up, our drillers had a challenge down the hole, so they had to pull out the drill pipe, sort the issue, and run the pipe again.That’s a lot of pipe, through the ice and down through our hole in the bedrock. It’s the nature of drilling in Antarctica, where the freezing conditions push our gear to the limit. The team are now back to pulling core, as we drill down through time into the geological archive of sediment hidden under the ice sheet at Crary Ice Rise.
Later than planned due to the weather challenges we’ve battled with this year. They arrived just in time to be here when our first core came out – which was lucky as many hands and types of expertise are needed for curating, processing and caring for our precious sediment in the field. They had to hit the ground running, moving straight into 12-hour shifts for our 24/7 operations. It’s wonderful to now have our whole team on site.
We have successfully retrieved sediment core from beneath 523 m of ice at Crary Ice Rise (ICDP SWAIS2C hole 5072_2_A), rotary coring with our custom-designed Antarctic Intermediate Depth Drill. Our first core measured in at 2.27 m, and by the end of the first 12-hour shift we had more than 10 m of core. After the challenges of the first two seasons, we are thrilled to be underway with obtaining the elusive geological record that we’re seeking from deep beneath the ice.
We’ve risen to the Antarctic drilling challenge – our riser is in, connecting the ‘Big Rig’ at the surface of the ice to the bedrock 523 m below. This is a custom-designed piece of engineering, made up of a series of weighted components which lodge into the bedrock, followed by sections of pipe. The riser parts are carefully lowered down the hole through the ice made by our hot water drillers, who continue to provide a source of warm water to stop the pipe freezing in place. With the drillers beginning to ‘run’ our drill string (smaller diameter pipe through which we will send our core barrel), we’re edging closer to drilling for the geological record we’re seeking!
While our drillers are hard at work moving forward towards geological drilling, our newly arrived science team are working at lightning speed to get prepared for when we have our first core on deck. They’ve dug out a pit for cold storage of microbiology samples. These need to be kept at around -20°C. The warm science container has been transformed into a lab, ready to X-ray cores and take sediment samples for microbiological analysis. The team were thrilled to find a note from last season left with the lab supplies wishing them well!
Our hot water drillers have successfully melted a hole through the ice at Crary Ice Rise (CIR; ICDP site: 5072_2) right down 523 metres to the bedrock below! Not an easy task! CIR is a ‘pinning point’ for the Ross Ice Shelf, a place where it rests directly on top of the seabed below, where it acts like an anchor for the ice shelf, resisting the flow of the ice away from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The team are now making another pass of the hole with a reamer to widen it to 35 cm diameter.
It’s a very Crary Christmas for our on-ice team in Antarctica! After several weeks of weather delays preventing them getting out to our deep-field camp at Crary Ice Rise, on Christmas Eve the team received the best possible present – a Basler flight to Crary! With the majority of our team now on site (5072_2), it’s full steam ahead towards drilling for sediment core from deep beneath 500 m of ice.
The team have begun to melt a hole through the ice to make our well. They’re using water from snow melted in the flubbers, warmed through six heaters to reach around 75°C, passed through the hose and out the hot water drill nozzle, which is slowly lowered through the ice to melt the hole. They’ll melt the hole to around 100 m below the ice surface, widen it to make a well cavity, and install a pump. Once the well pump is in place circulating water up to the flubbers, we’ll have an endless supply of water for drilling out main borehole through the 500 m of ice.
The team at Crary Ice Rise (ICDP SWAIS2C site 5072_2) have lowered the ‘cellar’ into a 3 m pit dug down into the ice. The cellar must be in place before hot water drilling gets underway, and is an important part of our AIDD (Antarctic Intermediate Depth Drill) system. The framing provides a space for equipment to sit below the drill rig at the ice surface. With the cellar installed we are a step closer to drilling our sediment core from the bedrock below the 500 m ice sheet.
Since arriving at Crary Ice Rise (CIR; ICDP_SWAIS2C_Site 2) our drill team have made great progress setting up the hot water drilling system inside the big orange drill tent, and assembling the AIDD (Antarctic Intermediate Depth Drill). Before we can begin to melt a hole through the 500 m ice sheet at CIR we need a supply of hot water, and luckily there’s no shortage of a crucial ingredient for that - snow. The team started this process by making ’seed water’ by melting snow in a small tub with a heated element. They are now using the warm seed water to melt even more snow, in our huge 12,000 litre flubbers.
Following some challenges with the weather, our hot water drillers and most of our AIDD (Antarctic Intermediate Depth Drill) team have arrived at our deep-field scientific drilling site at Crary Ice Rise (CIR; ICDP_SWAIS2C_Site 2); approximately 700 km from Scott Base.
They flew there on a Basler BT-67 (DC-3), a journey over the Ross Ice Shelf taking around two hours. Having set-up sleeping tents, they’re now busy preparing to get our hot water drilling underway. Our Co-Chief Scientists Molly Patterson and Huw Horgan, and the rest of the team will fly out to join them soon.
Our drillers and first of the on-ice science team have arrived at New Zealand’s Scott Base, and are keeping busy while they wait for suitable weather to fly to Crary Ice Rise (ICDP_SWAIS2C_Site 2). They practiced critical survival skills as part of Antarctica New Zealand’s Antarctic Field Training, and spent the night in tents at Windless Bight.
Over at the US’s McMurdo Station, they were treated to a tour of Crary Lab, including the famous touch tanks where they met some of the critters who live around McMurdo Sounds. The lab has a special connection with our season this year, as the lab and our field site are both named after Albert P. Cary, an American pioneer polar geophysicist and glaciologist. They stepped back in time with a visit to Scott’s Discovery Hut, getting a glimpse of how tough the conditions were for the early polar explorers. There’s never a dull moment on Ross Island, but they’re looking forward to getting into the field when the weather clears.
It’s all go for our 2025/26 season! The Antarctica New Zealand traverse arrived at Crary Ice Rise (CIR; site 5072_2) on Friday 21 November, after a 13-day, 1100km journey over across the Ross Ice Shelf. The convoy of PistenBully polar vehicles towed equipment and supplies for the season, including 27-30 tonnes of drilling and science equipment, and 3.5 tonnes of food.
The six team members are now busy building the camp and preparing a skiway in the snow so that our drill and science team can fly in on ski planes. Our drill team have arrived at Scott Base, have completed field training and kit out, and will head out to CIR when weather permits.
Our mission to deliver globally important science has been a roller coaster of highs and lows over the past few days. We successfully deployed the sea riser (the series of weighted components and steel pipe that connects the ice shelf surface to the sea floor and helps support the drill string) through the 588 m ice shelf, and the ocean cavity, to the sea floor (a total 632 m distance).
We are thrilled with this achievement, a critical and challenging step never previously accomplished through a thick ice shelf, so far from a base or logistical centre.
The drilling team were more than halfway through lowering the drill string down the riser in preparation for coring, when we had to stop operations due to a serious technical challenge. Unfortunately, we could not resolve this issue in the field, and have had to stop drilling operations at the drill site 5072_1 (KIS3) for the season.
We are working at the frontier of logistics and scientific discovery, in an incredibly remote and harsh environment, and with that comes the risk of drilling not going to plan. Our talented team has put in a massive effort to get to this point, and we would have liked to see this effort rewarded with a sediment core from deep below the seafloor.
The geological record we seek is important for humanity, as we strive to mitigate and manage the impacts of climate change. We are proud to have taken on this challenge, and to have progressed closer than ever before.
We now look ahead to our next season at Crary Ice Rise, armed with new insights regarding our technological approach, and undeterred in our mission!
