An ambitious plan by a team of British scientists at the Antarctic to look for life in a lake buried under almost two miles of ice was abandoned this week, after a decade of preparation and almost a month of drilling.
h/t Maz2
An ambitious plan by a team of British scientists at the Antarctic to look for life in a lake buried under almost two miles of ice was abandoned this week, after a decade of preparation and almost a month of drilling.
h/t Maz2
I did like that fetching picture of the intrepid limey with its hand drill.
Just for show – a steam drill sounds more serious.
But let me get this straight – they were going to drill into a pool of water kept liquid by
pressure? A good thing they failed – they might have had their silly heads blown off.
Some other photos and video of this here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2250133/Crisis-ice-Broken-equipment-puts-7M-British-project-drill-2-MILES-Antarctic-ice-jeopoardy.html
Really, what I wanted to know is why their boiler failed to preform as required, and to see if they’d name the names.
http://www.ormandyltd.com/news/57/65/Hot-News—Lake-Ellsworth/
“preform”
Why didn’t they hire an Alberta drilling company. They drill couple mile holes through rock regularly at extreme temperatures. They would have had it done as quick as they could thread pipe together. Then they wouldn’t have needed the BS excuses. In projects like this, shouldn’t there be enough redundancy to preclude failure.
BS!!!! According to the manbearpigs and the UN(IPCC),there is NO ice on Antarctica.It all melted and flooded NYC.
“British scientists at the Antarctic”……ummmmm….should that not be “on” Antarctica? Sigh.Our intellectual supers.
Probably the same reason why Dr. Fruit Fly did not actually go to the real North Pole and state that Snta’s workshop was flooding last year.
On consulting a few sources, this story has the dirty smell of limeys seeking publicity. Somewhat like that expedition to reach the North Pole about five years ago. Why otherwise publicise failure?
Anyway, there is an extensive ice drilling community, which has existed since the 1950s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_core Several cores have been obtained which
are over 3000 m long. Obviously it is rather more difficult to obtain a good core than simply to
drill a hole. The longest core was at Vostok Station in Antarctica: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok,_Antarctica
the core being over 3500 m long. It was terminated just a hundred metres or so above Lake Vostok,
a very large freshwater lake: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Vostok
Vostok Station BTW is thought to be the coldest place on Earth. The recorded maximum
temperature there is -12.2 deg C.
This science requires maintaining a boiler, surely a critical skill in Antarctica, and something most elementary school kids could do, yet the Brits fail-again.
The Brits in their inimitable fashion maintain their goofy image of sporting but ill-prepared losers created by Captain Scotts expedition.
I thought the Russians already did this?
First they want everyone dead, now they’re looking for “new” life. Make up your friggn minds.
Like the caption say’s with man made global warming eminent , why not just wait a few months? But of course these idiots then want to take our money and stop it from happening.
Maybe they should just stop aborting little black babies and they’ll find new life for less tomorrow.
LOL Yep, they Shoulda Woulda Coulda!
It’s easy to be a Monday morning quarterback.
Scar asks: Why didn’t they hire an Alberta drilling company?
Well, they are not working in Alberta; they are working in the Antarctic. To get your oil drill there, and everything else, they would have to ship it to Punta Arenas Chile, then loaded on a big airplane and fly it 1883 miles nonstop, a distance similar to Calgary to Montreal. After unloading the cargo, the airplanes flies back to Chile with refueling, or in other words they must carry return fuel. Once on the ice they have to move it with a tractor train to lake. This took them four days this year.
A hot water drill is actually very fast, but you have to use fuel to melt the snow and heat the water. I don’t know what the fuel costs now, but it’s likely well over $100/liter by the time it gets there. They were trying to drill another hole to intercept the main hole and recirculate the water, however they missed the drill hole and had to stop.
There are more videos here:
http://www.adventure-network.com/news/lake-ellsworth-live
ES: Antarctic research teams will take aircraft fuel to Antarctica if they use air support. They move supplies by ship with aircraft to reach inland locations, in most cases. The cost of extra fuel for a particular experiment is thus incremental and your figure of $100/l seems excessive. In any case the British team probably had to move their kit from Scotland unless they sourced it from somewhere nearer, in the southern hemisphere.
In all probability this was a nice project for the university’s physics dept. workshops. In these situations there is often no budget for external sourcing but resources in place may be used even if the accounted cost gets ridiculous when compared with buying something off the shelf or contracting out. These essentially govt. projects can produce some fine one-off solutions and of course, the occasional disaster. There are many examples in Canada from our Defence Research establishments, the NRC other similar facilities.
Kind of defeats the purpose of looking for a unique set of microbes that’s been undisturbed for umpteen years if you contaminate it. Geez I expected better, this blog is usually so scientificaly literate.
kevinw “Geez I expected better, this blog is usually so scientificaly literate.”
You are hereby appointed scientificaly(sic)literate officer, in charge of keeping us on the straight and narrow.
greenmamba
“ES: Antarctic research teams will take aircraft fuel to Antarctica if they use air support. They move supplies by ship with aircraft to reach inland locations, in most cases.”
Where this station is located there are no ports where they can unload fuel, and has a runway long enough to use for a large aircraft. BTW, I am very familiar with this area of the Antarctic, having worked there.
“Your figure of $100/l seems excessive.”
Twenty five years ago the price was $200 /US Gal or $53/l.
No doubt an Alberta drilling company could master ice drilling. But there are already companies which do ice drilling for hire. It is not completely straightforward BTW – it’s a little like machining electrical grade copper. The ice tends to fill in between drill or saw teeth, clogging them.
In the `70s a company I was associated with had a contract to cut out 7 tons of ice from a grounded iceberg near Nain, for ice mechanical strength testing in support of the Hibernia development. The field party used long chainsaws – and at first got absolutely nowhere. Then they learned an in and out motion which threw off the ice between the saw teeth on the “out” pull after every “in” stroke. Once they had mastered the correct stroke, quarrying the ice went quickly and was completed in about two days.