Drilling operations for the South Pole Ice Core (SPICEcore) project

• Main Authors: Johnson, Jay A, Kuhl, Tanner W, Boeckmann, Grant, Gibson, Chris, Jetson, Joshua, Meulemans, Zachary, Slawny, Kristina, Souney, Joseph M
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: University of New Hampshire Scholars' Repository 2020
• Subjects: ice core; ice drilling; ice engineering; Glaciology; East Antarctica; Austral; South Pole; Antarc*; Antarctica; South pole
• Online Access: https://scholars.unh.edu/ersc/213; https://scholars.unh.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1213&context=ersc

Over the course of the 2014/15 and 2015/16 austral summer seasons, the South Pole Ice Core project recovered a 1751 m deep ice core at the South Pole. This core provided a high-resolution record of paleoclimate conditions in East Antarctica during the Holocene and late Pleistocene. The drilling and core processing were completed using the new US Intermediate Depth Drill system, which was designed and built by the US Ice Drilling Program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In this paper, we present and discuss the setup, operation, and performance of the drill system.