White paper: Ice Core Drilling Technical Challenges

Our ability to continue to build our knowledge of the Earth’s climate systems through the wealth of information accessible from ice cores depends on our continued ability to meet the technical challenges associated with successful recovery of good-quality ice cores in a variety of glaciological settings.

IPICS, through the four identified joint projects described in the IPICS white papers, has articulated a suite of requirements for drilling and coring capabilities to support their scientific goals. Although many of these requirements can be met with currently available technology, some will require the extension of current technologies or the development and testing of new ones.

Further requirements have been articulated by communities outside of the current scope of planned IPICS activities. These communities have articulated requirements such as drilling and recovering rock cores from the bottom of the ice core borehole, clean-drilling requirements to preserve the integrity of biological material in the core (including the approaches to sub-glacial lakes), the development of successful strategies for coring and recovering ice charged with varying percentages of particulate material (e.g. silty ice, rock glaciers), development of a rapid access technology, and better utilization of the borehole once coring operations are completed (e.g. various logging methods or the emplacement of instrumentation in the hole).

Planning for the capacity to meet these requirements will be a key component for the future success of IPICS and other programs that depend upon ice drilling technology to meet their scientific goals.