Andrill

I toured the Andrill Lab in the Crary Science Building this evening. ANDRILL (ANtarctic geological DRILLing) is a multinational collaboration comprised of more than 200 scientists, students, and educators from five nations (Germany, Italy, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States) to recover stratigraphic records from the Antarctic margin. The chief objective is to drill back in time to recover a history of paleoenvironmental changes that will guide our understanding of how fast, how large, and how frequent were glacial and interglacial changes in the Antarctica region. Future scenarios of global warming require guidance and constraint from past history that will reveal potential timing frequency and site of future changes. (http://www.andrill.org/)
Anrill is a 30 million drilling project. Last year, the drilling site was on the permanent Ice shelf, about 5k from Scott Base, near Williams airfield. They drilled through the Ross Sea Ice Shelf (80 meters), the Ross Sea (800 meters), and the floorbed (1200 meters). That was the deepest anyone has ever drilled in Antarctica. The sediment they recoved was up to 10 milion years old.

This year, they are drilling on the sea ice, about 5k from open water. The site on which they are drilling will be open ocean in a month or so. Within a couple weeks, Andrill will be forced to pack up their drill and head home. Tonight, the drillers reached 1000 meters beneath the sea bed, and recovered core samples aged around 19 million years.
The drillers recover the rock in three meter cylindrical sections, about 2 inches in diameter. The rock is shipped from the drilling site, every night via helicopter, to McMurdo Station, where analysis begins. The samples are promptly sliced in half: half is archived and half is analyzed. Ater the rock is split and a high resolution photograph is taken, Sedimentologists, Geochemists, Micropaleontologists, and Paleomagnetitists all jockey to slice and dice the samples. Much of the record taking and analysis is done on station by scientists who literally work round the clock, without a day off (not even for Turkey day), for the two-three months they reside here. The Rock cores will all be packaged and shipped back to civilization for further analysis. Thats where I fit in to the Andrill project: I rudely and lazily toss their samples (which cost aproximately $15,000 per meter) onto an air force pallet, crush it down with straps, and rattle it around on a forklift before loading it onto a loud and bumpy C-130 military aircraft.
But I digress.
The tour was excellent. We touched rock that was 17 milion years old.
http://www.andrill.org/iceberg/photos/index.html