Introduction to the Andrill programme
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Transcript
- Donald
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The Andrill project is a fantastic pushing of the boundaries of technology and it’s very closely related to climate change. In fact it’s probably true that without our concern about climate change, that the Andrill Project probably wouldn’t have got funded. Now we have got a hole….there is a hole being drilled in Antarctica at the moment, and there are some remarkable things about it. One of them is, is that its probably going to be one of the most expensive holes that humans have ever drilled. It’s 60 million NZ dollars, the logistics and difficulty of drilling in Antarctica, and getting the story out of the rocks that are in Antarctica about what has happened over the past 50 million years in Antarctica and how that relates to the rest of the planet, is quite a remarkable story.
Now everybody knows Antarctica is the coldest, the windiest and most desolate remote place you can go on this planet, but there are a couple of other things about this. One of them is that nobody has ever drilled through an ice shelf before, and the ice shelf that that is happening on, is the Ross Ice Shelf.
But if I actually use behind me the Andrill logo, I will just show you a couple of things about where we are going and why this is particularly difficult. Here is a map of Antarctica. Where we’re off to in Antarctica, is here. Now Antartica is round, with two big ice shelves in it. And the Antartic Peninsula, here, heading off towards South America. New Zealand is where the pen is now. This is the Ross Ice Shelf, this blue one, and it’s about the size of Western Europe, certainly the size of France at least. And the red dot is where Ross Island is, about here. Not as big as the dot, and just off from that is where we’re going to go drilling. Now the Andrill Project is shown in this logo here. We’ve got the ice shelf, here, here’s Mt Everest, shown as a volcano, and sea ice on the other side, much thinner. Here’s the drill rig. The top part moves that up and down to cope with the tides. The drill mast and hot water drilled through the ice shelf, round about 800,000 metres of sea, and then 14,000 metres of core from the sedimentary rocks down there.