Engineers from the Ice Coring and Drilling Services at the University of Wisconsin returned home last week after an expedition to retrieve information on climatic changes in West Antarctica.

The National Science Foundation�s Ice Core Project aimed to retrieve columns of ice that contain gasses and biological matter from the past 100,000 years. The ice was extracted from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide using a deep ice sheet coring drill.

�The drill was built in a warehouse just off campus,� said Jennifer O�Leary, associate university relations specialist for the Space Science and Engineering Center.

The coring drill is a special hollow drill that cuts holes 122 millimeters in diameter and three meters in length. It is designed to collect ice core from as deep as 3,800 meters.

�The drill is like a long cookie cutter,� said Charles Bentley, principal investigator for the DISC drill project. �It has a long tube with a cutter on the bottom. It cuts out a whole column of ice, and after the column is about 3 meters into the tube, it comes back up, and the ice is pushed out of the tube.�

The ice core in the WAIS Divide will give researchers unprecedented insight into climactic changes and history in order to provide a detailed account of the climate in the past 40,000 years.

The first 580-meter core that was extracted from the almost 2 1/2-mile deep WAIS Divide will be sent to the Ice Core Lab in Denver, Col., where researchers and scientists will analyze the gasses, dust particles and biological matter found in the tiny air bubbles trapped in the ice.

�The [gasses trapped in the] ice core will give information primarily about past climate,� Bentley said. �The more we know about the climate in the past, the more we will know about [the climate of] the future.�

The design team at UW began building the drilling machine several years ago, said Alex Shturmakov, project manager of the ICDS drill project.

�We first tested the drill in Greenland,� said Shturmakov. �We drilled over 180 meters of ice. It was very successful.�

The team brought the drill back to Madison to recalibrate a few parts and then sent it to Antarctica.

This particular part of Antarctica � the west region � was chosen for several reasons, Charles Bentley said. The WAIS Divide is a very thick ice core, and the area has a high level of snow accumulation.

�That means you get a higher resolution record [in the data], and we should be able to count back the annual layers in the ice,� Bentley said.

However, the ice that the team will be drilling next year is very different from that of this year.

�Next year we will be drilling brittle ice, which is likely to shatter if we ship it,� Bentley said. �The ice will sit at the site for a whole year to settle and then will be shipped to Denver.�

Shturmakov said that this is the first of three drillings that the team will do. They plan to take the core in three sections, drilling the last two sections in the next two years.