Glacier adventures: Drilling through the Thwaites Glacier

The last time I wrote here we were desperately trying to get out of McMurdo and onto the Thwaites Glacier. It's a long journey to a very remote location, so nothing comes easy. But, by now, I am comfortably back in Alaska (although it is colder here than it has been in Antarctica ...).

But all in due order. On 13 December, after one month in McMurdo things all of a sudden started moving quickly. After two false starts with lots of waiting, I was part of an advance team to WAIS Divide, where a big camp was set up to receive major amounts of cargo. Once at WAIS Divide we immediately transferred from the big LC-130 aircraft to a Basler (a converted DC-3) and arrived that same day on our field site; the home for the next five weeks. During that time we were doing lots of surveying with radar and seismic methods. I was in charge of hot water drilling. We completed two holes through the Thwaites Glacier Iceshelf, did some profiling of the underlying ocean, took sediment cores and installed ocean moorings and a fibre that allows us to monitor temperatures throughout the ice and water column. The work went very well, and we are now excited to see the data come in via satellite from one of the most rapidly changing places on this planet. More on the project and the whole collaboration is at thwaitesglacier.org

The Thwaites work is getting a huge amount of attention, for example from the BBC (although this report mostly covers a companion project with very similar goals).

Here are some of my pictures to give an impression of the work.

The Basler is a converted DC-3. This airplane was built in 1942, but was refurbished with new engines. It is now one of the power houses of Antarctic field work.

Here is the Basler and the other Antarctic workhorse, the Twin Otter. They have just landed at our field site.

Day 1: Still looking fairly well groomed

After a month on the ice my iphone face recognition didn't work all that well anymore...

Dale is taking stock of all our equipment that now has to be assembled

A radar survey team is slowly disappearing into a whiteout. We had to careful mark all routes, so we wouldn't get disoriented and end up in heavily crevassed area.

Our kitchen tent

Erin and Ted are cooking a yummy dinner

The hot water drill is set up: In the foreground are several diesel heaters that bring water to almost 80 deg C. In the background are two holding tanks. We pump water back out of the borehole into the holding tank, heat it up and then use it to drill through the cold ice.

The big wheel is a capstan winch over which the drill hose is guided into the hole. The smaller crescent guides another hose and an electric cable into the upper part of the hole. This is used to pump water back.

James is happy about the first sediment core from underneath the Thwaites Glacier iceshelf. Hopefully it will give us information about the history of ice cover in this area.