GISP2 Notebook, No. 3

On 1 July 1993, after five years of drilling, the Greenland Ice Sheet Project Two (GISP2, Figure 1) penetrated several meters of silty ice and reached bedrock at a depth of 3053.44 meters (Figure 2), and then shortly thereafter penetrated 1,55 meters into the bedrock (Figure 6 and 7) producing the deepest ice core thus far recovered in the world. A companion European ice coring effort, the Greenland Ice Core Project (GRIP), located 28 km east of GISP2 reached an ice depth of 3028.8 meters (> 250,000 years of record) in July 1992 (Dansgaard et al., 1993). Ongoing and planned comparisons between the ice core records at these two sites will add substantially to our understanding and verification of this unparalleled view of climatic and environmental change, the longest ice core record available from the Northern Hemisphere.