Polar Archive

Drilling in the Arctic - Climate Research for the Future

Lake El’gygytgyn has moved firmly into the focus of international climate researchers – its sediments represent the longest continuous terrestrial Arctic climate archive.
The lake, located in the extreme north-east of Siberia, was formed 3.6 million years ago by a meteorite impact. Relatively undisturbed sediments have been forming on the lake bed since then. These sediments may to reveal information on how the continental Arctic has reacted to past climate changes. This, in turn, will allow inferences on how the Arctic will react to changes such as global warming in the future. The Arctic plays a primary role in climate research, because the processes involved take place here much earlier and faster than anywhere else on Earth and interact with global changes in climate.

In the mid-1990s it was noticed that the region around Lake El’gygytgyn has never been glaciated and the subsurface is therefore not impacted by sliding. This is what makes it so unique. It is also why the sediments and the underlying impactites provide such a clear picture of the history of the lake and its environs.
Between January and May 2009 a total of 42 international scientists and engineers set out to sink deep boreholes in the lake. The complete infrastructure required for the expedition team and the Russian camp crew was established on the lake shore. Accommodation, kitchen and sanitary facilities, generators, extensive drilling equipment, scientific instruments, crates for storing sediment samples and large quantities of petrol and diesel – all needed to be transported to the lake, a logistical masterpiece.

The drilling technology used and the drilling platform, mounted on skids, originate in the USA. Their route led from Salt Lake City via Seattle to Vladivostok (only a few hundred kilometres north of North Korea). Here they joined up with two containers of scientific instruments and equipment from Germany, which in turn had travelled via lorry to St. Petersburg and continued from there on the Trans-Siberian Railway. The containers were shipped from Vladivostok to Pevek, Russia’s northernmost town, 260 kilometres from Lake El’gygytgyn as the crow flies. From here the equipment was taken by lorry and tracked vehicles across the frozen tundra to the lake – 400 kilometres away by land. 

The expedition team reaches Pevek via Moscow. After a sojourn lasting several days they are taken to Lake El’gygytgyn by the only helicopter in the region.
A seven kilometre ice road must first be levelled on the frozen lake, connecting the camp with the drilling site, so that scientists and engineers can safely reach the platform, and cores and material be transported.

On an area with a diameter of 100 metres, experienced Canadian engineers have thickened the ice on the lake from 70 centimetres to a total of 2 metres – only then can they be certain that the approximately 70 tonne drilling platform can be safely supported complete with equipment. Lake water is pumped onto the surface of the ice and freezes in a very short time at temperatures as low as -45 °C. Layer for layer – this thickening takes several weeks.

The Arctic boreholes are produced under extreme conditions: besides the low temperatures there are often snow storms, which regularly reach hurricane strength. This also makes core storage difficult: the lake sediments must be stored at a constant 3 – 4 °C, the same conditions as those prevalent at the bottom of the 170 metre deep lake. Freezing or overheating of the cores would destroy their structure, they would be practically useless. Special containers, which guarantee constant temperatures, are developed and manufactured in Germany for the long shipping routes. The lake sediments are investigated and evaluated in Cologne in the hope of gaining new knowledge about why massive climatic cooling occurred approximately 2.6 million years ago and how the Arctic reacted to it.

The scientific partner institutions involved with the El’gygytgyn Drilling Project are the University of Massachusetts on the American side; NEISRI Magadan and AARI St. Petersburg on the Russian side; the University of Vienna on the Austrian side and the Alfred Wegener Institute, GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam and the University of Cologne on the German side. Project manager on the German side is Prof. Dr. Martin Melles from the Institute of Geology and Mineralogy at Cologne University. At the same time, he also coordinates the German partners and their subprojects.
The El’gygytgyn Drilling Project is made possible by funding from BMBF, ICDP, NSF, RAS and ICDP Germany.

For further information visit:
www.elgygytgyn.uni-koeln.de






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