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Ice core scientists in East Greenland reach bedrock
- dclowd9901 3y agoI’ve always wondered: what do they do if the shaft snaps somewhere in the middle?
- aio2 3y agoThis is more for oil drilling, but this is a possibility. https://www.drillingformulas.com/fishing-drill-pipe-procedure-screw-in-drill-pipe/ https://www.drillingformulas.com/fishing-drill-pipe-procedur...
- sleet_spotter 3y agoI'm not totally sure how systems work for drilling this deep, but typically ice core setups attach the coring apparatus to the surface via a cable that is spooled by a winch. The cable itself ends up being the heaviest part of the system.
- sdfghswe 3y agoCan't believe they don't show a photo of what appears to be a 10 meter in diameter, 2.7km deep hole.
- giantrobot 3y agoWhat an ice hole.
- JimtheCoder 3y agoTo be fair, is a photo of a hole that interesting?
- iknowSFR 3y agoI mean, there’s an entire multi-billion dollar industry dedicated to photos of holes.
- CrzyLngPwd 3y ago[flagged]
- jprd 3y agohttps://old.reddit.com/r/trypophobia/ https://old.reddit.com/r/trypophobia/
- cancerboii 3y ago[dead]
- dang 3y agoPlease don't do this here.
- peoplearepeople 3y agoyes, people love pictures
- mbfg 3y agoHere's a picture of a cat sitting on the hole.
- tokai 3y agoIts more like 5cm in diameter.
- dewey 3y agoIt's a bit hidden but there's at least a few cool pictures in the "Facts about the EGRIP camp" section (Click the + icon). There you can see that the actual hole is ~10cm in diameter and the actual drilling site under the snow.
- jtsiskin 3y agoOr a video dropping a rock into it
- hinkley 3y agoThe camera wouldn't take the picture, and then several of the scientists had to be sedated as they started acting strangely.
- FredPret 3y agoThere's a bright future in big holes. Imagine what we can get our hands on if we could find a nice, cheap way to dig 10+ km down all over the place. The mantle is 2000+km thick. Our deepest mines are 3-4 km deep. We could also harvest a ton of heat this way - and maybe even use it for garbage disposal. Master Of Orion 2 had the Deep Core Mines and Core Waste Dumps - maybe that's the way to go!
- TechBro8615 3y agoIs the idea of using a big hole for garbage disposal that we would dump the garbage into the molten core and let it burn? Or is it more about using the hole as a really deep landfill?
- hinkley 3y agoDo you know what a hole from the surface to the molten core is called? An active volcano.
- FredPret 3y agoScary thought but you’d (have to) stop digging way above the molten part. It heats up way above 100C long before you get there, which should be plenty for geothermal energy. I wonder if sustained high temperature exposure would gradually decompose plastic / toxic waste / other bad things into less harmful components. Of course, heavy elements came from down there, so it’s probably not an issue to dump them back down. Just stay well clear of the water table! I am of course not a geologist, and it’d be interesting if one could give a perspective on this.
- hinkley 3y agoI'm not sure how tall a column of water you need to trigger supercritical water oxidation, but the problem would be getting the oxygen down there. Better to do that stuff at the surface, I think.
- TechBro8615 3y ago
- TheRealPomax 3y agoIce cores are a few inches across. The photo at the top of the article is not of the drill hole but of the hole they had to dig in the snow to get to the ice they actually drilled. See the photo of the final ice core [1] to see how miniscule the actual drill hole is. [1] https://science.ku.dk/english/press/news/2023/pay-dirt-for-ice-core-scientists-in-east-greenland-as-they-reach-bedrock/billedinformationer/20230721_SteffTrevor__photo_Sepp_Kipfstuhl_.png https://science.ku.dk/english/press/news/2023/pay-dirt-for-i...
- Giorgi 3y agoWhy is is black and white though? also - how do they transfer energy to drill down 2.7km? or how the hell does it work?
- TheRealPomax 3y agoSee other comment, and "that's a fun thing to check youtube for", respectively =)
- tgamma 3y agoAs mentioned in the article, the core was handled under red light to prevent any potential damage. Perhaps the decision to convert the photograph to black and white was made because otherwise it would have been black and red.
- blackkettle 3y agoThe article definitely makes it sound like they had “boots on the ground”. There’s a picture of muddy boots and the caption says they are covered in ancient mud.
- tokai 3y agoThat mud came up with the last core.
- TheRealPomax 3y agoYou need to clear a lot of snow before you can stand on the ice that you're drilling in (You can't drill straight if your rig's sitting on snow, you need to dig until you hit solid ground, and in this case the ground is ice). That's the "boots on the ground" part. They were physically there to do the drilling (as opposed to giant automated core drillers such as DISC[1], which don't require "boots on the ground" so much as they just require one or more operators to oversee operation) The ancient mud's from hauling up the ice cores, not from standing 3 kilometers deep in a giant hole. [1] https://icedrill.org/equipment/deep-ice-sheet-coring-drill https://icedrill.org/equipment/deep-ice-sheet-coring-drill
- chakintosh 3y agoJust for fun: Volume of ice = π * (radius)^2 * height where radius = diameter / 2 and height is given in meters. Volume = π * (10m / 2)^2 * 2700m Volume ≈ 354,177.66 cubic meters The density of ice is approximately 917 kilograms per cubic meter. Weight of ice extracted = Volume * Density of ice So, the weight of the ice extracted from the hole is approximately 324,856,152.42 kilograms. Greta must be fuming. In all seriousness though, ice cores are a few inches in diameter, not 10 meters. Unless they take one of those tunnel boring machines and send it vertically down through earth.
- sgirard 3y agoInteresting: "Towards the base, the ice is more than 120,000 years old and dates back to the last interglacial period, a time when the atmospheric temperature above Greenland was 5°C warmer than today."
- robertlagrant 3y ago[flagged]
- WhitneyLand 3y agoI’m not aware of any data that supports humans 120k years ago having a significant impact on the earths climate. I think even our ability to start fire at will is conclusively known to be only ~50,000 years ago.
- hutzlibu 3y ago"Claims for the earliest definitive evidence of control of fire by a member of Homo range from 1.7 to 2.0 million years ago " https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_humans https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_hum... You don't need to be able to start a fire, when you keep the fire burning all the time. And you can do that, once you control the fire and figure out the difference between dry and wet wood. Also humans are the dominating species on land since quite a while. Hunting certain species to extinctiom has certain effects on the local ecosystem and globally on the global climate. It all adds up. But things surely changed in dimension since industrialisation.
- dekhn 3y agoPeople had fire in those times but it's extremely unlikely they produced enough CO2 to have an anthropogenic impact on the climate leading to large-scale temperature changes. I'm not sure what your perspective on this situation is but I think the case for modern anthropogenic climate change with deleterious effects is based on a wide range of different evidence, and a careful accumulation of facts and analysis. Simply pointing out that humans had fire 2Mya doesn't change the general conclusion about today.
- marcosdumay 3y agoPlease, if the title is going to be that, at least remove the capitalization from that "m", so it represents an unity instead of "millions of something undisclosed".
- JimtheCoder 3y ago"so it represents an unity instead" If you are going to be pedantic, that "an" should be an "a", no?
- ksd482 3y agoThat’s what I was thinking, yes. You have to think HOW you pronounce the word. The ‘u’ in “unity” is pronounced as “you” which starts with a consonant. Hence, you use ‘a’ not “an”.
- lopis 3y agoI've always wondered this, as a non English native speaker. You could also say the "u" in unity is pronounced as "iu" which starts with a vowel and sounds the same as "you", so your reasoning sounds incorrect. Perhaps a better explanation is that the "iu" diphthong is already paired together, so attaching it to the "an" sound to form "aniu" doesn't roll off the tongue as well.
- hunter2_ 3y agoCorrect, this particular diphthong and the substitution of "an" for "a" serve the same exact function, so having both would be redundant. If we were to look at a word that starts with u but doesn't have the diphthong, such as Ubuntu, then "an" is used.
- hunter2_ 3y agoI think unity is just a typo for unit, not that that changes this discussion.
- tokai 3y ago
- holoduke 3y agoWould it theoreticaly possible to find frozen animals 120.000 years old with still intact DNA?
- sedatk 3y agoYeah, DNA in ice has a half-life of a million years. Seems very much possible.
- wwwtyro 3y agoWhat does half-life mean in the context of DNA? One base pair corrupted / unrecoverable? Half of them?
- netcraft 3y agohalf life generally means that within the time frame 50% of the material will have been destroyed or changed. so it would mean that half of the dna might still be available after 1M years
- graycat 3y agoTo be meaningful, half-life needs a Markov assumption, i.e., that the past and future are conditionally independent given the present. Or, more simply, at each instant, forget the past and for predicting the future use only the present. Some interesting work in the many contexts where half-life works would be to say what the Markov property says about the mechanism of the decay or whatever are trying to predict in the context.
- monocasa 3y agoHalf of them. Which is still useful in biological samples that have billions of copies.
- amelius 3y agoYeah, you can still assemble a genome even if strands are broken. In fact this is done all the time as the size of the strands going into DNA sequencers are often only 100s or maybe 1000s of basepairs.
- CrzyLngPwd 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- roter 3y agoAt approximately the same depth drilled, Antarctica e.g. EPICA @ Dome C yields 8 interglacials [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Project_for_Ice_Coring_in_Antarctica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Project_for_Ice_Corin...
- ultrablack 3y ago[flagged]
- chrisco255 3y agoGiven that Greenland regularly gains surface mass, even this year gaining close to 50 gigatons as of June 20th: https://nsidc.org/greenland-today/files/2023/06/SMB_Fig3_15Jun23.png https://nsidc.org/greenland-today/files/2023/06/SMB_Fig3_15J..., you might have to wait a few more millenia or even another 100K before the next interglacial.
- fg__ 3y ago[flagged]
- ballenf 3y ago[flagged]
- ChuckMcM 3y agoThis is a very important project. There is a joke in here about "why not wait 2 years for the ice to melt off if you wanted to look at the mud underneath?" But as the article states, "'This will change climate models because it redefines our basic understanding of how ice moves,' explains Dorthe Dahl-Jensen." Much, if not the majority, of climate science is the creation of models (differential equations mostly) that describe the "response to influence" of the big chunks of things that cause the climate on the planet. The better the model, the better able we are to guess what will happen next (which is sorely needed in a system where you cannot control the input variables by declaration). One of the big unknowns in the model is "where will the clouds show up?" That unknown stems from our understanding of the water capacity of air by temperature, the increase in air temperature leads to the air holding more water, and water is the basis for cloud formation. If the clouds form "low" they increase albedo and create colder temperatures, if they form "high" they act as a semi-mirrored surface and reflect light that has been reflected from the surface back down for another shot at generating heat. Much of the IPCC's work has been done in MATLAB[1,2] so if you have a reasonably powerful workstation you can play around with various initial conditions and settings yourself to see what might happen in the future. No matter what the far future holds, the near future holds more violent storms as storms are powered by the temperature differentials of the air, land, and sea. It is of note (for me, probably not for many others) that we don't have good models for how an ice age starts. There are a few papers that talk about ice ages being a response to warming (hit a tipping point, generate clouds, and get a "nuclear winter" scenario without the nuclear part). But much of the nuclear winter work has been refined and that scenario is generally considered unlikely AFAICT from what people seem to be publishing these days. Turco's work[3] and things that cite it are a good jumping off point if you want to read up on that. It isn't perfect because smoke/soot are not clouds (different albedo numbers, different cooling attributes) but the accumulation and dispersion of atmospheric obstructions is solid stuff. [1] Some code and information used to generate plots in the IPCC reports -- https://github.com/IPCC-WG1/Chapter-9 https://github.com/IPCC-WG1/Chapter-9 [2] Mathworks trying to get you to buy their climate data toolbox -- https://www.mathworks.com/discovery/climate-stress-testing.html https://www.mathworks.com/discovery/climate-stress-testing.h... [3] Climate and Smoke: an Appraisal of Nuclear Winter -- https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.11538069 https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.11538069
- johnnyApplePRNG 3y agoThat's a rate of about 4.3 centimeters per hour. Can anybody elaborate as to why this process takes so long?
- klyrs 3y agoI've never drilled a hole with 10m diameter before, but I imagine they've been more careful about taking and studying cores than you were.
- Zamiel_Snawley 3y agoSurely you mean 10cm?
- klyrs 3y agoMy word. I and at least one other poster here were misled by the picture at the top of the article. But, for whatever it's worth, a trip to Wikipedia tells me that they took 2 years off, due to covid.
- joshvm 3y agoIt's more realistic to say that covid caused logistics issue two summers in a row. The first summer was presumably 2020 when almost every country locked down. In 2021 things weren't much better and the various polar programs were dealing with both caution and a backlog of issues from the previous year. The actual downtime may have been significantly less than 24 months but still could have killed progress for 36. There's a pretty small window that you can deploy for these sorts of operations.
- roter 3y agoDid you store the tube of ice?
- lexicality 3y agoit's a very high aspect ratio hole (267:1) so they have to peck-drill it and it takes a very long time to lift the drillbit to remove the swarf from the end
- mr-wendel 3y agoIf drilling big holes for scientific research is your thing, I suggest https://usoceandiscovery.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Cascadia-Report.pdf https://usoceandiscovery.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Casc... as an interesting read about earthquakes and tsunamis. A quick summary: > Geophysical and hydrological observatories in sealed boreholes provide a powerful tool to understand the hydrology of crustal formations, a means measure the hydrologic signal from changes in volumetric strain, and a stable site for high quality seismic and geodetic instrumentation. This data is not just useful on its own, but also when correlated to other research. For example, 400+ years ago there was a large earthquake (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1700_Cascadia_earthquake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1700_Cascadia_earthquake) off the US Pacific Northwest coast (and corresponding tsunami in Japan) that is referenced.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bobske3 3y agoAt the mountains of madness
- toshk 3y agoI love humans. They somehow decided to start drilling, and not give up & get funding for 7 years. We are a crazy but exciting bunch of organisms.
- uncletammy 3y ago> We are a crazy but exciting bunch of organisms. I read this as "crazy but extinct bunch of organisms"
- mensetmanusman 3y agoAlso read extinct. Ha. Would be cool to know how to detect and exploit these speed reading induced recognition errors to write things that force people to slow down or go extinct :)
- midoridensha 3y ago>I read this as "crazy but extinct bunch of organisms" That'll be true too, eventually. The way we're going now, it might not even be that long... I think we should build a monument on the Moon with an archive of data of our cultures (including a copy of Wikipedia), built to survive for as long as possible, so that alien explorers can learn about us after we destroy ourselves, and learn how we managed to do so so they don't repeat the same mistake.
- hk__2 3y agoThat’s because we are social animals. We tend to do things not only for ourselves, but also to contribute to the society we live in.
- m3kw9 3y agoHave a drink?
- samstave 3y agoThere is a design for an ice-melting-slurry-bot that could be made, where the outer diameter of the bore is melted by heat/lasers - where the lasers/heat is also projected into a cone at the point of the bore-ing machine, where the center pipe is a vacuum to slurp up the slurry as it melts the ice around the bore-head...
- BenjiWiebe 3y agoYou aren't going to be able to vacuum slurry up from several km down.
- bequanna 3y agoEven with a very small diameter hose/pipe?
- qbrass 3y agoThe smaller pipe has less water in it, but the surface area the vacuum can act on is also smaller so the column of water equals out the same as with the larger pipe. At sea level, that's about 30 feet deep. If you want to bring water up from deeper, you have to move the pump down the well and push the water up the pipe instead of trying to suck water up like the pipe's a straw.
- hanniabu 3y agoThat would ruin the core samples
- samstave 3y agoWe dont want the core samples intact (we want to kill microbiologics on the way down to the goal, which is the crust and determination for other vacuous caverns under the ice, via both vertical and horiz boring. and cameras in crytal lenses to withstand the heat or polarize against the lightwaves of the lasers such that they are clear and a good image can be seen. /Sci-fi.. My original comment is my idea based on the 1960s patents for nuclear tunnel boring machines which use the reactor heat to exchange the tunnel walls to molten glass... (And I am really into DUMBS - as are many) https://patents.google.com/patent/US3885832A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US3885832A/en There are a lot of patents like this - so dont think this line of thought was abandoned, Hello Musk's Boring company... Good thing hes connecting State on a Deep level.
- albert_e 3y agowhat is the risk of uncovering ancient viruses and bacteria from permafrost that we don't have immunity to
- hannasanarion 3y agoVery very very low. Bacteria and viruses are normally very sensitive to their hosts, they have a kind of symbiosis that means they can't just arbitrarily infect any species they bump into. Jumping between species does happen, and when it happens it can be a big problem (see COVID-19, Swine Flu), but there is something like 100 million different virus species out there [1], and only 200 or so are able to infect humans [2]. Despite constant interaction between people and all other species of viral host all over the globe, and millions of brand new new virus exposures daily, jumps are still so rare that they are decade-defining when they happen. 1. https://virology.ws/2013/09/06/how-many-viruses-on-earth/ https://virology.ws/2013/09/06/how-many-viruses-on-earth/ 2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3427559/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3427559/
- Clamchop 3y agoI read a book, How to Clone a Mammoth, by ancient DNA researcher Beth Shapiro. If what she wrote holds true deep in these glaciers (which take a long time to form so they presumably weren't always buried so deep), then the answer to what the risk may be is "very remote". DNA and RNA disintegrates into very small tatters pretty easily, turns out, frustrating the reconstruction of ancient genomes. Bacteria are definitely dead on multiple counts and viruses will be shredded.
- Archelaos 3y agoHere is an article from 2021 that covers that topic: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42398-021-00184-8 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42398-021-00184-8 From the conclusions: "... as shown by recent outbreaks of diseases caused by supposed to be extinct microbial pathogens immured in glacial ice for centuries, there is a serious risk for future epidemics (or even pandemics) to happen more often."
- anon25783 3y agoNegligible. You're far more likely to fall ill from bacteria in your garbage disposal or fungi in your bathroom.
- deafpolygon 3y agoIsn't this the basically the plot to the prequel of The Thing?
- mr_toad 3y agoDigging too deeply has been a plot point in many stories. There’s even an urban legend that a failed Soviet borehole project broke into ‘hell’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_to_Hell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_to_Hell
- taf2 3y agoFrom the picture that looks like a pretty large hole... any chance that execrates the melting process by increasing the surface area? Or is it insignificant just curious if someone has thought about or done any calculations...
- robotnikman 3y ago>electromechanical drill designed to take 122 mm (4.8-inch) diameter ice cores Interesting that they choose 122mm as the core size when designing the drill. It makes me wonder if its built from a decommissioned and repurposed 122mm artillery gun barrel.
- Scofield67 3y ago[flagged]
- stainablesteel 3y agoso how do they know its not just a big rock covered in frozen mud with more ice below it
- almostnormal 3y agoTwo numbers from the article: The oldest ice is 120000 years old. The ice is moving at 58 m/years. If these numbers are correct the oldest ice has travelled almost 7000 km. Greenland isn't that large, and it did not shrink. The age estimate is probably correct. The speed must have been a lot lower in the past?
- Deskegende 3y agoOr it was moving in a different direction
- macinjosh 3y agoI have a hard time trusting climate data from before we had satellites or other forms of precise automated recording. If climate scientists are telling us they _know_ detailed information about global atmospheric temperatures, greenhouse gas concentrations, etc. over millions years because they cored some ice from a select set of places on earth, I just don't know how an average person is supposed to believe that. It appears to the layman to be data generation on par with an episode of CSI where the lab somehow 'enhances' low res photos to high res. Where are the million year long experiments demonstrating how ice and its contents changes over such long time spans, that vast majority of which we were not even conscious for as a species? It is too many variable to fit into any sort of computing technology today, and the science is mostly based on statistics which everyone knows can be twisted easily.
- abenga 3y agoThere are thousands and thousands of papers with specific models. Do you have specific criticism of any of them other than a hand-wavy "I don't understand them, so they are probably untrustworthy"?
- yieldcrv 3y ago> The researchers literally got mud from under the ice cap on their feet. stop the presses! why is this article written this way? a mixture of factual science and juvenile exuberance.
- mble 3y agoThey can use this method to break the bedrock and reach the void - https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Tutorials/Breaking_bedrock#Method_1_2 https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Tutorials/Breaking_bedrock... It is important to note that you need to be very careful near the void, as it is very hard to escape, and 64 blocks down you get instant damage which would get you killed.
- gffrd 3y agoFinally, a new ice product for cocktail enthusiasts to fetishize.