Clean subglacial access: prospects for future deep hot-water drilling

Makinson, K.; Pearce, D.; Hodgson, D.A.; Bentley, M.J.; Smith, A.M.; Tranter, M.; Rose, M.; Ross, N.; Mowlem, M.; Parnell, J.; Siegert, M.J.

doi:10.1098/rsta.2014.0304

Clean subglacial access: prospects for future deep hot-water drilling

Makinson, K.; Pearce, D.; Hodgson, D.A.; Bentley, M.J.; Smith, A.M.; Tranter, M.; Rose, M.; Ross, N.; Mowlem, M.; Parnell, J.; Siegert, M.J.

Authors

K. Makinson

D. Pearce

D.A. Hodgson

Professor Michael Bentley m.j.bentley@durham.ac.uk
Professor

A.M. Smith

M. Tranter

M. Rose

N. Ross

M. Mowlem

J. Parnell

M.J. Siegert

Abstract

Accessing and sampling subglacial environments deep beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet presents several challenges to existing drilling technologies. With over half of the ice sheet believed to be resting on a wet bed, drilling down to this environment must conform to international agreements on environmental stewardship and protection, making clean hot-water drilling the most viable option. Such a drill, and its water recovery system, must be capable of accessing significantly greater ice depths than previous hot-water drills, and remain fully operational after connecting with the basal hydrological system. The Subglacial Lake Ellsworth (SLE) project developed a comprehensive plan for deep (greater than 3000 m) subglacial lake research, involving the design and development of a clean deep-ice hot-water drill. However, during fieldwork in December 2012 drilling was halted after a succession of equipment issues culminated in a failure to link with a subsurface cavity and abandonment of the access holes. The lessons learned from this experience are presented here. Combining knowledge gained from these lessons with experience from other hot-water drilling programmes, and recent field testing, we describe the most viable technical options and operational procedures for future clean entry into SLE and other deep subglacial access targets.

Citation

Makinson, K., Pearce, D., Hodgson, D., Bentley, M., Smith, A., Tranter, M., …Siegert, M. (2016). Clean subglacial access: prospects for future deep hot-water drilling. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 374(2059), Article 20140304. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2014.0304

Journal Article Type	Article
Acceptance Date	Sep 21, 2015
Online Publication Date	Dec 14, 2015
Publication Date	Jan 1, 2016
Deposit Date	Mar 22, 2016
Publicly Available Date	Apr 1, 2016
Journal	Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences.
Print ISSN	1364-503X
Electronic ISSN	1471-2962
Publisher	The Royal Society
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	374
Issue	2059
Article Number	20140304
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2014.0304

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Copyright Statement
© 2015 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.