Vol.11 No.4, Geophysical Institute Quarterly, Summer 1993

When scientists from the University of Alaska Fairbanks hit bedrock under Greenland’s ice cap for the first time in history this summer, the event macic newspaper headlines around the country. The drill cut through 10,015 feet of glacial ice to grab a sample of bedrock and to pull out a core of ice more than 250,000 years old.

That ice core is a frozen record of ancient weather patterns and its analysis already has shed light on dramatic shifts in past climates. Scientists also will use the crystalline core to advance research on potential global climate changes in the future, and to learn more about glacial physics.

From the drawing board to the test site -- Larry Kozycki of the Geophysical Institute Machine Shop designed the drill that hit bedrock.

Baxtor Burton, assistant director of the university Polar Ice Coring Office, said obtaining the ice sample was as great a feat as getting the first rocks from the surface of the moon. And the similarities between the two ventures don’t end there.

Engineers and mechanics tried for years to put a man on the moon. They designed one rocket after another, adjusting bolts here and engine parts there, until they found the perfect combination. When the astronauts finally made it, there was a great deal of celebrating down below. We made a hero of Neal Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, but can anyone remember the name of the engineers that designed the rocket to get him there?

Five years ago, shortly after UAF was awarded the PICO contract, Larry Kozycki was asked to design and develop a drill that would bore through ice in Greenland. Kozycki, supervisor of the Geophysical Institute Machine Shop, luckily has never been one to run from a challenge, because walk into a challenging situation he did. The drill used previously for the PICO project was inadequate and there was little money available for research into better drill design or for a test well in which to try it out. Kozycki had to start from scratch. The design of the drill that eventually hit bedrock started on a chalkboard in his office and progressed to stacks of paper on his desk. “The design did not come from intuition,” he said. “The whole process was like putting together a puzzle.” It fit together one piece at a time.

The first step was to build the drill in the machine shop. Then, without many preliminary tests, it was sent on a plane to Greenland four years ago. Once there, the 80-foot drill worked, but not perfectly.

To make the necessary changes, Kozycki visited the field site, which he describes as a barren, white place where temperatures average out 20 degrees below zero, the wind rarely stops blowing, and everyone has a cold. To make life additionally challenging, the drilling crew is required to wear protective slickers over their clothing and to breathe through gas masks to ward off fumes from the butyl acetate used in the drilling process. Butyl acetate is the liquid that makes deep drilling into glacial ice possible. Weighing the same as ice, it’s used to offset the enormous pressures ex­erted by the surrounding mass of the ice cap. That means a hole filled with butyl acetate will not collapse. Because it does not dissolve the ice and does equalize the pressures in the hole, butyl acetate also helps keep the recovered ice cores intact, even those taken from deep within the glacier. Consequently, a drill using butyl acetate can pull up complete cores of ice from over 3,000 meters deep, while dry coring without butyl acetate can only bring up complete ice cores from about 300 meters. Ice cores brought up from greater depths usually crack because the bubbles of air trapped within them expand at the surface, an effect similar to what happens when a can of soda goes aloft in an unpressurized airplane.

When his experience in the field came to an end, Kozycki came back to the machine shop to make revisions that enabled the drill to work better the following season. During that 1991 field season, drilling went smoothly until the crew began having engine trouble.

Back at the drawing hoard, Kozycki designed a power pack that could withstand well over 5,000 pounds of pressure per square inch; the power pack was at the bottom of the 10,000-foot hole when the drill hit hit bedrock this summer. The third season, work slowed because the drilling cable showed signs of wear and needed to be replaced, but this summer all the effort paid off. A special diamond-tipped rock-core drill built by the machine shop descended into previously unchartered territory below the Greenland ice cap to grab more than a meter of bedrock. Descending to such great depths was a victory for the National Science Foundation, which has funded the project since 1988. NSF was impressed enough to ask the machine shop to build a duplicate drill for research in Antarctica, but later decided it was more cost effective to move the existing Greenland drill instead. The drill is just one of many projects undertaken by the machine shop, where all levels of work are performed, from designing and building high-tech equip­ment to hanging bookshelves. Just the other day, a request came through from the Department of Transportation. It seems they want the shop to design a machine that will graphically illustrate the way studded tires wear down a road surface. Kozycki already has ideas about how to make the machine work, and a stack of working designs on his desk.