News — An international research team, led by Professor Dorthe Dahl-Jensen of the University of Manitoba and University of Copenhagen, has reached a significant milestone by drilling through 2670 m of ice on the North Greenland Ice Stream and reaching bedrock after seven long years.
This is the first time a deep ice core has been drilled through an ice stream, and the ice at the base is more than 120,000 years old. Researchers have discovered the ice stream is flowing like a river of ice ripping itself free from the surrounding slow flowing ice sheet, with rock and sand embedded at the bottom of the ice.
Dahl-Jensen has confirmed that the ice is indeed melting at the base, signaling trouble ahead. The ice core will be analyzed in laboratories around the world to better understand the changing ice sheet and improve sea level predictions.
“I am so excited about this success,” said Dahl-Jensen. “I have followed the flow of the ice by measuring the shape of the borehole through the years with a borehole logger. The fact that the ice is sliding like a block on mud will change the models and improve the sea level predictions.”
“I would like to extend my congratulations to Dorthe on this remarkable accomplishment in climate change research,” said Mario Pinto, Vice President (Research and International). “UM is proud to lead this important milestone in Arctic science and climate change research. We are confident this result will increase awareness and knowledge of how rapidly the effects of climate change are transforming our planet.”
Backgrounder
The story
The first ice cores were drilled exactly 7 years ago on 21 July 2016. Two of the field seasons, in 2020 and 2021, were cancelled due to COVID. The last 4 meters of the ice core was drilled with a rock drill setup due to the presence of pebbles in the ice. The very last core was drilled 21 July 2023.
Knowledge on how the Greenland ice streams move are key to understand how sea level rise will be in the future. The ice loss from the Greenland ice sheet is a major contributor to sea level rise and is expected to increase as the temperatures over Greenland continue to rise. Half of the ice loss is from the ice streams surrounding Greenland and the behavior of the ice streams is not well known. The results from the EGRIP ice core drilled through the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream will thus advance the accuracy of predictions of sea level rise.
The EGRIP project
The international EGRIP project has participation from 12 countries. These contributing nations are Denmark, US, Germany, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, China, Canada, France, South Korea, UK and Sweden. The logistics have been done by University of Copenhagen and US National Science Foundation. All nations have participated in field work and ice core drilling. 40 per cent of the more than 600 field participants have been young scientists being trained at the international environment at EGRIP (31 per cent senior scientists, 29 per cent supporting staff). Samples from the ice cores have been analyzed in more than 30 laboratories and several papers have been published. Information on the project, publications and field work can be found on . The EGRIP ice core is stored in the Danish ice core repository together with most of the deep Greenland ice cores.
Innovation and new technology
As part of the ice core drilling project, new technology and innovation has been developed. The EGRIP camp is a mobile camp with the main building, the Dome, on skis and the rest of the equipment and infrastructure on sledges. The entire camp can be removed and pulled by tracked vehicles to new drilling sites on the Greenland ice sheet. The subsurface drill trench and science trench were constructed by inflating balloons with a diameter of 5 m and a length of 45 m in 7 m deep trenches in the snow. Snow was blown on top of the balloons and after a few days the balloons were deflated and removed leaving trenches for drilling and analyzing the ice cores. A new and environmentally friendly drill fluid is used in the borehole. A new electronic navigation package in the Danish made drill made it possible for drillers to control the inclination of the ice core drill and make future replicate coring in the same bore hole possible.
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