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Flags from countires involved in Antarctic science

ANDRILL

ANDRILL drill rig in Antarctica

The ANDRILL (ANtarctic geological DRILLing) Project is an international consortium of more than 200 scientists, students, and educators from Germany, Italy, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. ANDRILL will use a combination of techniques that include geophysical surveys, stratigraphic drilling and core analysis, and numerical modeling to study the climate, ice sheet and tectonic evolution of Antarctica during the last 55 million years. This year, Terry Wilson and graduate student Cristina Millan went to Antarctica as part of ANDRILL.

Some of the women of ANDRILL. Terry is second from the left, and Cristina Millan, a graduate student of Terry's is in the middle.   (Photo by Alex Pyne)

The ANDRILL project will allow the study of Antarctic tectonic problems, including uplift history of the Transantarctic Mountains and its relation to the rifting of the Victoria Land Basin. The two drill holes planned for the first ANDRILL portfolio are already underway: the MIS (McMurdo Ice Shelf) project successfully recovered 1285 m of core during the 2006-2007 season.The SMS (Southern McMurdo Sound) project is scheduled to begin in early October 2007.

A view from outside the ANDRILL drill rig (Photo by Cliff Atkins)

A view from inside the ANDRILL drill rig

Several studies and techniques will be performed in the cores in order to obtain data that will aid in a better understanding of the tectonic history of the area. The study of natural fractures in core and in the borehole walls will provide a record of Neogene faulting history and paleostress directions associated with rifting in the western Ross Sea; age constraints will be provided by dating the strata they cut. Drilling-induced fractures in core will be used to document the in situ stress regime in the Antarctic interior, while borehole hydraulic fracturing experiments can characterize the magnitudes and orientations of modern crustal stresses. We also expect to determine the evolution of fluid sources relative to the deformation history during rifting, including the timing of deformation relative to deposition and the temporal evolution of structurally-controlled fluid pathways, to discriminate fluid sources related to specific structure types and, potentially, to obtain independent age constraints on faulting and related fluid fluxes.

Terry Wilson with ANDRILL colleague Tim Paulsen (University of Wisconsin) examine the split core to chose samples for further analysis

New age data from the MIS and SMS core, together with seismic reflection profiles obtained from Terror Rift research, will allow the reconstruction of regional patterns of basin subsidence and provide constrains in the regional rift history and kinematics of the Victoria Land Basin and the Terror Rift.

While drilling was a 24 hour operation, 7 days a week, the occasional break for drill rig maintenance did allow for some important bonding among scientists, setting the stage for future research collaboration. Shown here are collaborators Terry Wilson, Cristina Millan (graduate student of Terry's), and Tim Paulsen (University of Wisconsin colleague).