The British Antarctic Survey has developed a rapid access ice drill that uses a novel technique of an ice auger inside a barrel to drill a dry borehole in polar ice. The dry borehole remains open for geophysical instrumentation.
The system is based on a tripping drill which is cable hung from a high speed winch and lightweight tower, and recovers the full load of ice chippings from the borehole very ~2m of drilling.
Ice is drilled and recovered in the original stratigraphic order, so is suitable for some limited 'ice core' type analyses.
Our current system is potentially capable of drilling a 500m hole over about ten days (though we have only to date successfully tested it in Antarctica to a depth 105 m). The test revealed that the concept of drilling a dry borehole with an auger is fundamentally workable, but that some improvements of the engineering are required.
The current 500m system is designed to drill an 80 mm borehole, and the full system weight is less than 700 kg (drill, winch, cable, tower, and generator), easily fits into a Twin Otter, and requires two people to operate.
We are now exploring the idea of increasing the drill system size to achieve a 220 mm diameter 130m deep borehole in ice, principally to enable rapid drilling of a hole ready for casing for subsequent deep ice core operations in fluid-filled boreholes. Our design for the larger drill also limits system components to deploy in a single Twin Otter load.
Are you interested?
We would like to gauge interest from the community. Do you have a use for such a 'rapid' drill system? What diameter/depth characteristics would be ideal for your use?
Ideally, we would like to hear of any interests (no commitment of course!) or comments before 26th June 2017 to fit with a funding deadline.
Please respond directly to:
Robert Mulvaney rmu@bas.ac.uk
Julius Rix jrix@bas.ac.uk
Thank you for your time
Robert Mulvaney and Julius Rix
British Antarctic Survey
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