Englacial and Subglacial Access Working Group

A virtual meeting of the Englacial and Subglacial Access Working Group (ESWAG) was held on April 8, 2026, to discuss updates to the Long Range Science Plan (LRSP) and other ESAWG business. Discussions included updates from IDP and RAID. Terry Benson, Director of the Physical Sciences Lab at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, discussed water sampling for microbiologists from the IceCube drill and provided information relevant to science requirements for deep hot water drilling. David Harwood announced that due to university cuts and reorganization, The University of Nebraska–Lincoln would not be doing future deep hot water drilling, although they still have a few interested staff. Also, the ESAWG discussed ice drilling technology development priorities for the LRSP. The agenda and presentations from the meeting are available on the IDP website.

The members of the ESAWG are:

• Ryan Venturelli, Chair (Colorado School of Mines)
• Jason Briner (SUNY Buffalo)
• Brent Christner (University of Florida)
• Britney Schmidt (Cornell University)
• Jeff Severinghaus (Scripps Institution of Oceanography)
• Heidi Smith (Montana State University)
• Joseph Talghader (University of Minnesota)

In the previous Ice Bits newsletter, it was reported that an ice core community workshop would take place on Sunday, December 6, 2026, in San Francisco, CA, prior to the AGU Fall Meeting. However, during the 2026 Ice Core Working Group (ICWG) meeting, the ICWG decided not to hold a community meeting at the 2026 Fall AGU Meeting. Instead, the focus has turned to holding a joint ICWG and Englacial and Subglacial Access Working Group (ESWAG) meeting in Colorado in 2027. More details will follow as planning for the meeting progresses.

Each year the annual update of the IDP Long Range Science Plan is finalized in June to include recent input from the IDP Science Advisory Board (SAB), the IDP Working Groups, and the research community at large; the SAB prioritizes items within the section on Recommended Technology Investments.  In October 2025, the SAB revised the language in the June 2025 Long Range Science Plan on a priority item involving hot water drilling; it was revised so that it now reads:

• Describe/adapt the design and develop a cost estimate for the future build of a clean modular hot water drill (e.g. replicate the BAS modular drill for holes up to 3,000 m depth) that minimizes logistical footprint including fuel supply.

IDP engineers are currently working on this task. A paper on the BAS drill was published in 2020 by Makinson and others and can be downloaded from https://doi.org/10.1017/aog.2020.88. The updated IDP Long Range Science Plan can be downloaded from https://icedrill.org/long-range-science-plan. U.S. scientists who are interested in using a clean hot water drill to 3,000 m depth are invited to provide input to IDP on the draft IDP Science Requirements for a Deep Clean Hot Water Access Drill. Please send an email indicating your interest to Icedrill@Dartmouth.edu and we will follow up with you.

A virtual meeting of the Englacial and Subglacial Access Working Group (ESAWG) was held on April 9, 2025, to discuss updates to the Long Range Science Plan (LRSP) and other ESAWG business. Discussions included updates from IDP and the NSF Ice Core Facility (NSF-ICF), discussion about an ESAWG white paper, ESAWG priorities for IPY, and ice drilling technology development priorities for the LRSP. The agenda and presentations from the meeting are available on the IDP website.

The members of the ESAWG are:

• Ryan Venturelli, Chair (Colorado School of Mines)
• Jason Briner (SUNY Buffalo)
• Brent Christner (University of Florida)
• Britney Schmidt (Cornell University)
• Jeff Severinghaus (Scripps Institution of Oceanography)
• Heidi Smith (Montana State University)
• Joseph Talghader (University of Minnesota)

The IDP Englacial and Subglacial Access Working Group (ESAWG) had a successful in-person long-term science planning workshop on December 8, 2024, in Alexandria, VA. Workshop participants included an engaged group of 29 scientists with expertise ranging from subglacial geology, sediments & ecosystems to ice dynamics to borehole and englacial monitoring to engineering. The goal of the workshop was to find community consensus on priority science questions, locations, measurements, and technologies for englacial and subglacial science for the coming decade. The meeting started with remarks from Dr. Alex Isern, NSF Assistant Director for Geosciences. Early career scientist and ESAWG Chair Dr. Ryan Venturelli capably led discussions and planning activities.

Outcomes from the workshop include the identification of three key questions: 1) How will ice sheets contribute to sea level rise in the coming decades to century? 2) What drives grounding zone variability over tidal to millennial timescales? 3) How can we constrain bed conditions to better understand glacial basal sliding? 

Community priorities include: 

• Sub-ice access to the subglacial environment upstream and downstream of modern grounding zones
• Deep subglacial access to test for smaller ice sheet configurations in both Greenland and Antarctica
• Development of a smart hot water drill that enables deep (>3km) drilling and sample recovery from wet beds
• Development of technology to enable long-term subglacial observatories. 

White papers initiated at the workshop will be further developed, made available to the broader community for additional input, and finalized this winter to incorporate the results into the IDP Long Range Science Plan in spring 2025.

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The U.S. Ice Drilling Program (IDP) convenes a Science Advisory Board (SAB) to form and update the Long Range Science Plan that addresses multiple aspects of ice core and other ice science and associated technology. The annual SAB meeting was held in-person on February 15-16, 2024, in Arlington, VA. The first part of the meeting was an open session and included updates from IDP, the NSF Ice Core Facility, the Ice Core Working Group, and the Englacial and Subglacial Access Working Group (ESAWG). It also included discussions regarding ESAWG planning, and Safe and Inclusive Plan templates. The second part of the meeting was a closed session in which the SAB prioritized the technology investments outlined in the Long Range Science Plan and discussed SAB member rotation and SAB Terms of Reference. 

The members of the SAB are: 

• T.J. Fudge, Chair (University of Washington)
• Joel Harper (University of Montana)
• Matthew Siegfried (Colorado School of Mines)
• Sarah Shackleton (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)
• Martin Truffer (University of Alaska Fairbanks)
• Ryan Venturelli (Colorado School of Mines)
• Trista Vick-Majors (Michigan Technological University)

With access to the polar ice sheets beginning to open following the pandemic years, the Science Advisory Board of the U.S. Ice Drilling Program (IDP) has recommended that the Subglacial Access Working Group (SAWG) and Borehole Logging Working Group (BLWG) cease as separate groups. Instead, a single new working group, the IDP Englacial and Subglacial Access Working Group (ESAWG), is being formed. The ESAWG will provide an opportunity to develop and articulate new visions for U.S.-led englacial and subglacial science for the coming decade in the IDP Long Range Science Plan.