While our hot water drillers are busy getting our hole through the ice shelf, our AIDD (Antarctic Intermediate Depth Drill) team have also been hard at work with our ‘big rig’. They’ve assembled the custom-designed geological drill that we will use to retrieve a sediment core from up to 200 m deep into the seafloor below the ice shelf. The rig has weathered a long Antarctic winter, remaining here at teh drill site (SWAIS2C_5072_1) since last season, so the AIDD team are giving it some TLC and have been testing its operation. To prepare for drilling they’ve used the rig to put together the drill pipe, joining 3m sections together to make 6m lengths. We’ve now got a total of 620m of pipe ready to go.  (see Gallery for more images)