Polar Science and Fast Ice Sheet Drilling - the FASTDRILL Perspective

Antarctica and Greenland represent natural laboratories, which yield discoveries that advance different scientific disciplines and capture the imagination of the general public. The scientific community interested in sampling polar ice sheets and their substrata has been growing recently and now incorporates biologists, geologists, geophysicists, glaciologists, and paleo-climatologists. Significant advances in these scientific disciplines will require targeted sampling strategies and the acquisition of data from arrays of deep access boreholes on spatial scales ranging from local to continent-wide. The International Polar Year will provide an excellent platform for launching the latest US initiative aimed at providing polar scientists with new means necessary for rapid and mobile access to englacial and subglacial environments. This initiative was discussed at the FASTDRILL workshop held at UCSC in October 2002. The overarching goal of the workshop was to begin the process of matching specific drilling and sampling technologies to broad objectives of interdisciplinary polar sciences. All scientific disciplines represented at the workshop identified several top-level questions that can be addressed with aid of the FASTDRILL platform. Biologists are interested in investigating life in icy environments as a potential analog for extraterrestrial life, and to better understand the origin and evolution of life on our planet. Interactions between tectonic processes and ice-sheet evolution are of primary importance to geologists and geophysicists. The glaciological community is very interested in the stability of modern ice sheets and in extending the ice core record of paleoclimate back in time. The FASTDRILL workshop provided an opportunity to recognize the high degree of commonality in scientific objectives and drilling targets across the different polar sciences. The desired FASTDRILL platform must meet high expectations in terms of mobility, rapid recovery of short ice, rock, and sediment cores, and ability to acquire subglacial water samples. Technological challenges associated with development of such a platform are matched by the high level of scientific interest in acquiring the capability for fast and mobile ice sheet drilling and sampling. The scientific payout of such investment will last for decades beyond the International Polar Year and will do much to advance the polar sciences and Earth sciences in general.