Early Polar Ice Core Drilling Activities
State University of New York at Buffalo
Department of Geology
Dr. Chester C.Langway Jr
Chairperson：
So we will call upon Mr Chester C. Langway, Professor Emeritus of the State University of New York, and he will be talking on the subject of ice-land drilling in Greenland.
We'd like to call upon Professor Langway. Professor Langway is a Professor Emeritus of the State University of New York - Geological Sciences, and was the person who was one of the first researchers to drill into the ice sheet in Greenland - in Greenland in the 1960s. In Greenland and in Antarctica, for the first time the deep sea drilling succeeded in reaching the bed-rock. And since then Professor Langway has been very actively involved in the drilling activities in Greenland and in Antarctica, and so has contributed much to promoting research in the ice sheet drilling area. Professor Langway please.
Doctor Langway：
The scientific knowledge of the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets has been greatly increased during the last half of this century. A great deal of this new knowledge was obtained from studies made on a relatively small number of ice cores recovered from both ice sheets by various national and international teams of researchers. Some of the larger projects have succeeded in auguring completely through the inland ice sheets.
The first successful attempt to core drill to a significant depth (over 300m) on an inland ice sheet was made in NW Greenland in 1956 by USA SIPRE. Under the scientific leadership of H. Bader, core drilling into polar glaciers for scientific purposes was a serious and important research pursuit at SIPRE since the early 1950s. The initial ice core recovered from Site-2 (R. Lange, J. Tedrow) provided a 305m (10 cm dia.) vertical profile from the snow accumulation zone, and exposed the inner structure and composition of an active continental-type glacier that was not previously available.
Yesterday we heard talks by Sigfus Jonsen (University of Copenhagen) and Hitoshi Shoji (Kitami Institute of Technology, Japan) on the current status of drilling projects in both Greenland and Antarctica. In my talk this afternoon I will focus primarily on the US involvement and early history of ice core drilling, and end by showing a number of slides illustrating field activities.
