# CLIMCOR: a 7 year project to develop new generation of drilling/coring tools for the and international scientific communities

Denis-Didier Rousseau, Michel Calzas

► To cite this version:

Denis-Didier Rousseau, Michel Calzas. CLIMCOR: a 7 year project to develop new generation of drilling/coring tools for the and international scientific communities. European Geosciences Union. European Geosciences Union General Assembly, Apr 2018, Vienne, Austria. Copernicus Publications. hal-05070368

HAL Id: hal-05070368

https://hal.science/hal-05070368v1

Submitted on 23 May 2025

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# CLIMCOR
## Paleo CLIMatic CORing: High Resolution and Innovations

The French coring/drilling has been acknowledged among the leaders in this field for the last 20 years or so, especially in ice and marine domains. However technological developments are pursued at different levels and the present CLIMCOR project, funded by the French Government new program for excellence in Infrastructures, intends to provide the French scientific community with top-notched technological support and a new generation of drilling/coring tools. CLIMCOR project concerns ice, continental and marine coring activities.

General contacts for CLIMCOR : PI D.D. Rousseau (denis-didier.rousseau@lmd.ens.fr) & co-PI M. Calzas (michel.calzas@cnrs.fr) ANR-11-EQPX-0009-CLIMCOR

http://climcor-equipex.dt.insu.cnrs.fr

Fundamental paleoclimatic data, being geochemical or geophysical, cannot be recovered without sophisticated technological equipments to retrieve top quality records. The increasing complexity of the mechanisms to decipher in climate models render mandatory to improve not only the quality, but also the temporal and spatial coverage as well as the range of proxies acquired in paleoclimate archives. One key objective is notably to access very high quality data and high-resolution records that could extend their temporal coverage further back in time, in more contrasted climate conditions than the last two millennia or the Last Glacial Maximum, so that the calibration of the Earth system models could encompass a larger range of boundary conditions.

The available drilling/coring equipments in France did not allow such important jump in the quality of the data, and therefore in the knowledge of past climate variations at extremely high resolution.

A preliminary initiative named C2FN (Centre de Carottage et de Forage National, http://c2fn.dt.insu.cnrs.fr/spip/), supported by the CNRS, at the National Institute of Earth Sciences and Universe (INSU), gathered the present coring equipments located in labs, at the technical division of INSU or on oceanographic vessels, under a joint official umbrella, aiming at coordinating the different efforts conducted in marine, ice and continental drillings.

The 7-year CLIMCOR project (http://climcor-equipex.dt.insu.cnrs.fr/ 17.68 M€ funded by the national program on equipments of excellence) intended to support this effort by providing the French scientific community with top-notched technological support for the new generation of drilling/coring tools and for an upgrade of the Marion-Dufresne vessel capacity to collect oceanographical data as crucial complements of paleoclimatic data. CLIMCOR also developed a new database, a cyber repository, to properly archive the upcoming data obtained from the cores retrieved with the new equipments.

CLIMCOR will increase the competitiveness of the French paleoclimate and marine science community at the international level. It will contribute to bring key constraints on the possible range of future climatic evolutions, thus meeting societal and policymaker requirements. The technological developments aimed by CLIMCOR have resulted in new patents. Furthermore, while the C2FN infrastructure gathers renowned engineers in their respective fields, strong interactions with French companies are a daily routine for them. Our presentation is showing the completion of the different developments achieved in the ice, marine and terrestrial coring activities for the benefit of the French and international communities.

## CLIMCOR - ICE

Ice workpackage - O. Alemany & J. Chappellaz

The new tools could be split into three families:

### 1) New borehole loggers

New logger for geophysical measurements in previously-drilled boreholes: temperature, tilt, orientation, pressure (optical measurements) and a new sonic logger.

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>The logger being deployed at Dome C
In the EPICA borehole</figcaption></figure>

### 2) Equipment for improving chemical measurement in firn and high altitude drill

Equipment to be set up in a terrestrial traverse for field analysis of freshly drilled snow/firn cores and more generally, to collect samples in difficult environment.
Light High altitude drill, which has been used in 2016 & 2017 in the frame of the Ice Memory Project.

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Illimani: 2 ice cores down to bedrock</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>The SUBGLACIOR drilling probe being deployed at Dome C, and moreover the winches acquired in the frame of EQUIPEX CLIMCOR.</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>The new C2FN surface ice core drill being deployed in front of the new CLIMCOR caravans</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /></figure>

### 3) Improvement of the SUBGLACIOR drilling probe

## CLIMCOR - CONTINENT

Continent workpackage - L. Augustin & F. Arnaud

Three categories of equipment have been developed and bought:

1) A new lake drilling platform HYDRO is a complete innovative lacustrine platform developed to collect, in its prototype version, around 50m long sediment sequences in shallow water.

<figure><img src="image_7.png" /></figure>

### 2) New terrestrial corers

Several corers have been bought to complete the panel of corers already owned: wire line triplex PQ and HSP Ø98mm, STS Ø112mm, freeze corers which can be combined with the down hole hammer W50. An Ø74mm Amaury corer and a Ø100mm Russian corer have been fully redesigned and manufactured. The Amaury corer is a portable set for sand coring. The Russian corer is equipped to be used with a caterpillar drill rig. Combined with the W50 hammer it allows to collect up to 25m continuous sediment sequence.

<figure><img src="image_8.png" /><figcaption>Freeze corer</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_9.png" /><figcaption>W50 hammer with Ø100 russian corer</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_10.png" /><figcaption>Amaury corer</figcaption></figure>

### 3) New logistic vehicles

<figure><img src="image_11.png" /><figcaption>Van & telehandler onto trailer</figcaption></figure>

Newly bought logistic equipment facilitate field operation with 2 vans, 2 trailers, one telehandler. These are additional logistic support to the logistic equipment owned by C2FN.

## CLIMCOR - OCEAN

Ocean workpackage - H. Léau, Y. Réaud & X. Crosta

The goal of this workpackage was the improvement of both quality and size of the sediment cores. These two aspects relies on two main changes: the coring cable and the winch that drive it.

1) The winch has been improved with a new designed capstan and modernized electric & mechanical parts that upgraded its capacity up to 45 tons extraction pulling strength.

2) It has been rigged with a specially braided ("rope made with ropes") Dyneema cable of 35mm diameter and 7200 meters length. Its major aspect is its extremely high stiffness that is the main condition to solve cores samples' stretching.

<figure><img src="image_12.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_13.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_14.png" /></figure>

These new tools implemented on the R/V Marion Dufresne resulted in unprecedented coring results, especially highlighted during the ERC ACCLIMATE cruise where a dozen of perfect cores has been taken, up to 60 meters length at 3500 meters depth.

It also showed the coring difference between cores taken in 2002 and 2016 on the same site : the stretching is totally eradicated and the quality reaches is highest rank.

NB: the horizontal scale of the core pictures is dilated compared to their vertical scale

3) Included in the project was the complete refurbishment of R/V Marion Dufresne

<figure><img src="image_15.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_16.png" /></figure>

## THE NATIONAL CYBER-CORE REPOSITORY

https://cybercarothèque.fr - C. Pignol

Complementary to the development of the new drilling and coring tools, a cyber-core repository has been designed to collect i) all the data produced when using the new tools, and ii) the metadata available in the different French laboratories using drilling tools.

### 2) COREBOOK:

* Collect specific data

* Bring help to field operations

* Feed the database effortless

<figure><img src="image_17.png" /></figure>

### 1) Web portal:

* Welcome and display metadata

* Manage the park of available tools (C2FN + research units)

* Allocate unique international identification (IGSN)

* Feed international databases (INSPIRE, IMLGS...)

<figure><img src="image_18.png" /></figure>

### 2) COREBOOK:

* Collect specific data

* Bring help to field operations

* Feed the database effortless

<figure><img src="image_19.png" /></figure>