I took a trip out to the drill site one afternoon. and brought my camera It's about 12 Kilometers to the south, or a 30 minute ride in Snuffy. Two scientists from Russia were in charge of the drilling and there were two graduate students along to help out as well.

The team drilled to 100 meters in a little more than a week, one meter at a time. The cores are carefully weighed, measured, packaged and shipped home on the icebreaker.

The drilling team has about ten total sites along the traverse and will be looking primarily at chemistry within the snow to gain information about weather change. In addition to analyzing the gasses within the snow and ice crystals, Joe (one of the interns) will be looking at the isotopic signature of the crystals, which correlates to temperature at time of accumulation. So basically, they will have a temperature record for the last 1,000 years which will be useful in sorting out that pesky little global warming puzzle. Think they'll solve it?

~G