Drilling Ice and Subglacial Rock Cores for Scientific Discovery in a Changing Climate

Abstract

Ice cores drilled from glaciers and ice sheets provide a critical natural archive of current and past evidence of climate and environmental change, and subglacial rock holds evidence of past glacial extent. Current climate change is causing the demise of glaciers around the world; the scientific need to recover ice cores from mid-latitude glaciers is urgent before ice core records are lost to melt. Logistical access to uncertain ice sheet conditions is challenging. Retrieval of subglacial rock cores is needed for cosmogenic dating evidence of past sea level. This paper describes recent engineering advances in scientific drilling of ice and subglacial rock cores under conditions of current climate change. The successful efforts of the U.S. Ice Drilling Program to retrieve a surface-to-bedrock ice core from Quelccaya Ice Cap, Peru is described, along with the successful subglacial rock coring that retrieved the first meter-length bedrock cores underlying 509 meters of the Greenland Ice Sheet.