Thanks to some generous organizing souls, I got to take another trip out to the South Pole Ice Core drilling project this season to see them at work. A few weeks into season 2, they've made it down to about 1100 meters below the surface of the Antarctic ice sheet at South Pole and are hoping to make it as far as 1600 meters by the end of the summer. The building is much the same as it was when I posted about this project last year...
...but now the slices of ice that they gave us to hold are much older. This is SR with a 20,000 year-old piece of ice in his hands.
And this diagram shows how, once the cores are transported still frozen back to Denver, they are sawed up and distributed among different scientists with an interest in the project.
It was an eerily beautiful day out at the SPICECore site, too, which is a couple of miles from the main station. That's actually the sun in the sky up there, looking oddly moon-like.
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