Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Researchers who were at MSU recently testing the filtration system for a hot
water drill.
The drill will be used to melt through almost three thousand feet of the West
Antarctic Ice Sheet.
MSU egologist John Priscu is the acting chief scientist on the
project and has conducted research in Antarctica for more than twenty six
years.
We want to drill through the ice sheet,
we have to make a big hole.
In doing that there's people to surface, we're handling drils, we may
introduce organisms. You gotta go back to Antarctica this sterile
environment to some degree. By sterile I dont mean there's nothing there,
but whats there is Antarctic life.
Be good stewards,
we might keep it clean. This is the pump
filtration system for the Antarctic ice drill and the purpose of the Antarctic
ice drill is to drill through the ice sheet
and to find life down under icelakes. We need to filter that
water very carefully.
We do that trhough a two micron filter which filters out the dirt molecules and setiments and
things that we might find in the ice.
After the two micron it gets filtered to the .2 micron filter
to filter out any smaller particles that we might find in there
and after the .2 we go through two levels of ultraviolet filter system.
Which kills off any of the little bugs or bacteria that we might find on our
way down the hole to the lake below.
Researchers plan to collect microbial samples from the subglacial Lake Whillans.
We want to collect samples from down there and bring them up here
and test these hypotheses that we've posed. How do these organisms live?
What is their diversity, biodiversity?
We can't do that if we're measuring our own contamination.
So we want to keep everything as clean as possible.
So we bring it up
we know we have a pristine sample.
We get data from it, we know its data from Antarctica and not from
our own contamination.
Once we've collected our samples
were gonna take the drill out and let it freeze.
And it will be a clean hole freeze and we're going to move our next smapling site
and do it again and do it again.
Now importantly when we drill this filtration system is gonna be attached right
to drill and is always going to be filtering that water.
And we have sampling ports all through it, its got seven sampling ports, we are going
to be sampling those ports overtime while that drills running to ensure that its clean.
The ice is two miles thick and there's a million year
old record in certain places, at least in Antarctica, of climate. And we can see C02
in little tiny bubbles in there,
we can get temperature out of it.
Carbon, we can tell when theres forest fires, we can see the industrial age.
We can see it all, it there, its an open book, its a history book.
Every year there's a couple more centimeters of ice goes down that has a
record of every year.
Twenty million years of that and it gets built up.
This drill is a step in a new direction, it might enable us to get
faster
into these systems. Learn more about our climate as we need to learn more and
more about it.