UK scientists have succeeded in cutting a 2km hole through the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to its base. It's the deepest anyone has gone in the region using a hot-water drill. The British Antarctic Survey (BAS) pulled up sediment from the bottom of the hole and deployed a series of instruments. The researchers hope the project's data can help them work out how quickly the White Continent might lose its ice in a warming world.
The scientists are interested in the behaviour of Rutford because it's a pretty typical, fast-flowing, West Antarctic ice stream. Almost 300km long and 25km wide, it drains a lot of ice into the Weddell Sea. Researchers want to better understand how it all moves and to do this they need to know the nature of the sediments on which the ice is sliding and how much water might be lubricating its path to the coast.
To retrieve this information, the BAS team grabbed some sediments from the bottom of the hole and positioned instruments that can report back on the speed of the ice stream at its base. The data will be used to constrain the computer models that seek to predict future Antarctic melting under various warming scenarios.
News has arrived in the past couple of days that a second hole has now been drilled alongside the first. The desire is to drill a total of four, says team-member Dr Keith Makinson, which will enable the maximum number of instruments to be deployed. "It's not possible to put them all down a single hole," he told BBC News. "We're going for two holes at two sites. That's to look at different sediment types. There's one site where the sediments are much stiffer and harder, and the other where they're much softer. We want to look at the different properties."
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46978496
Well, well, well...
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