DISC drill tent

This afternoon I went over to check out the DISC Drill in operation. It was super cool. The Disc drill will drill the next deep ice core in West Antarctica. It is being tested right now at summit. The drill is a new drill and I got a personal tour of the drill by one of the drills designers and engineers Jay.



This drill will be able to drill to bed rock in West Antarctica. It can pull up 4 meters of core at a time. The wench can run a 3 m/s which is really fast. This drill is innovative because it does not have separate inside core barrel. The chips of snow that are created from drilling in the ice are caught in screens inside the same barrel that collects the ice core. The drill head has 4 bits instead of three.

The operation works like this. The drill tower and core barrel starts perpendicular to the snow and the core barrel starts drilling into the ice. Once it has drilled the core the wench pulls the core barrel up. Once the core barrel is in the drill tower, the tower rotates down so it is parallel to the snow. The core barrel is then picked up by a crane that spins the barrel around and moves it to the receiving area. The receiving area is the red part of the tent. This is where they will label, partially analyze and package the core. When the core barrel is moved next to the receiving area the core is pushed out onto the tray. This is all happening because there are guys in the computer room running the drill. I got to watch while they pulled a 2.8 meter core up from 140 meters deep in the ice.








I especially like the wench. The cable that they brought to Summit is only 1500 meters long. The one they will take to Antarctica is 3600 meters long. I forget how many tons it weighs but it takes one Herc flight to take just the cable. The drill is quite neat because it was built in pieces all of which come apart and fit perfectly onto Herc pallets. Because the DISC drill is in test mode the ice cores are not being used for science. The cores are starting to pile up outside the tent. It was nice to be able to play with some of the ice core and not have to worry about damaging them for science.