FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE<\/p>\n
10\/30\/14<\/p>\n
CONTACT: Kristina Slawny, kristina.slawny@ssec.wisc.edu, 608-263-6178 (prefers email for first contact)<\/p>\n
THEY KNOW THE DRILL: UW LEADS THE LEAGUE IN BORING THROUGH ICE SHEETS<\/p>\n
MADISON \u2014 Wisconsin is famous for its ice fishers \u2014 the stalwarts who drill holes through lake ice in the hope of catching a winter dinner. Less well known are the state\u2019s big-league ice drillers \u2014 specialists who design huge drills and use them to drill deep into ice in Greenland and Antarctica, places where even summer seems like winter.<\/p>\n
The quarry at these drills includes some of the biggest catches in science.<\/p>\n
A hot-water drill designed and built at the University of Wisconsin-Madison\u2019s Space Science and Engineering Center<\/a> and the Physical Sciences Laboratory<\/a> was critical to the success of IceCube, a swarm of neutrino detectors at the South Pole that has opened a new frontier in astronomy.<\/p>\n Hollow coring drills designed and managed by UW-Madison’s Ice Drilling Design and Operations<\/a> (IDDO) program are used to extract ice cores that can analyze the past atmosphere, says Shaun Marcott, an assistant professor of geoscience at UW-Madison. Marcott was the first author of today\u2019s paper in the journal Nature<\/a> documenting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere between 23,000 and 9,000 years ago, based on data from an 11,000-foot hole in Antarctica.<\/p>\n The ice drilling program traces its roots to Charles Bentley, a legendary UW-Madison glaciologist and polar expert. The program is funded by the National Science Foundation and housed in the Space Science and Engineering Center.<\/p>\n \u201cBuilding on Charlie\u2019s achievements, IceCube enhanced our competency of drilling expertise,\u201d says IDDO principal investigator Mark Mulligan. \u201cA 2000 award from the National Science Foundation brought in more engineers and technicians who understand coring and drilling.\u201d<\/p>\n IDDO program director Kristina Slawny spent six austral summers on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide project, which provided cores for Marcott\u2019s climate study. \u201cIt\u2019s an experience like no other,\u201d she says. \u201cWe sleep in unheated single tents that get really warm in the day and quite cold at night.\u201d<\/p>\n Crew compatibility is \u201chuge,\u201d says Slawny, \u201cand in a remote environment we focus on it, so we\u2019ve had really good continuity in our driller hiring. Once a group has worked together, we want them to stay. When everyone is cold and tired, they can get agitated easily, but for the most part, the crew was happy to be down there.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, \u201ceverything goes wrong, even the stuff you don\u2019t expect,\u201d she says. \u201cOne year it\u2019s mechanical, the next year it\u2019s electrical. One of our staffers, Jay Johnson, is a brilliant engineer and machinist who can fix anything, but it can take long hours and sleepless nights to keep the drill running.\u201d<\/p>\n Many projects under development require mobile drills, says Mulligan. \u201cThe science community has said we need a certain type of core in a certain location, but you may only be able to get there with a helicopter or small plane. That forces us to design smaller, or make something that can be set up relatively quickly. Agile and mobile are very big words.\u201d<\/p>\n As concerns about the climatic effects of greenhouse gases mount, Marcott says deep, old ice offers a ground-truthing function. \u201cHow do you know that today\u2019s carbon dioxide variations are even meaningful?\u201d he asks. \u201cWe have only 50 years of instrument data.\u201d<\/p>\n Climate studies require a much longer horizon, Marcott adds. \u201cWhen I measure CO2 from 20,000 years ago, I actually have air from 20,000 years ago, and so I can measure the concentration of CO2 directly. There is no other way to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n Much of the credit, Marcott says, is due to UW\u2019s ace ice drillers. \u201cWithout the ice cores being as pristine as they are, without the drillers being able to take out every single core unbroken to provide us with a 70,000-year record of CO2, we would not be able to understand how this powerful greenhouse gas has affected our planet in the past.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, carbon dioxide is growing at 2 parts per million per year \u2014 20 times faster than the preindustrial situation recorded in the ice cores. But even at the slower rate, climate reacted very quickly to changing levels of the key greenhouse gas, Marcott says. \u201cIt\u2019s not just a gradual change from an ice age to an interglacial. We need to know how the Earth system works, but without these ice cores, and the great effort from the drilling team, we would not be in a position to know.\u201d<\/p>\n ###<\/p>\n \u2014 David Tenenbaum, 608-265-8549, djtenenb@wisc.edu<\/p>\n Featured image: Kristina Slawny and Jay Johnson stand next to the Deep Ice Sheet Coring drill, designed and managed by the Ice Drilling Design and Operations group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Space Science and Engineering Center. The cutter head attached to the core barrel of the drill is at center. Credit: Jay Johnson, January 28, 2011.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Leads the league in drilling ice<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":6776,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured-stories","category-press-releases"],"acf":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ssec.wisc.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ssec.wisc.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ssec.wisc.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ssec.wisc.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ssec.wisc.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6725"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.ssec.wisc.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6725\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6778,"href":"https:\/\/www.ssec.wisc.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6725\/revisions\/6778"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ssec.wisc.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ssec.wisc.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ssec.wisc.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ssec.wisc.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}