page_title: Ice drilling
section_title: Rotary auger rigs
hierarchical_section_title: Ice drilling / Other drill types / Rotary auger rigs
caption_attribution_description: English: 24 inch auger used in testing polar construction equipment for the US Navy
context_page_description: Ice drilling allows scientists studying glaciers and ice sheets to gain access to what is beneath the ice, to take measurements along the interior of the ice, and to retrieve samples. Instruments can be placed in the drilled holes to record temperature, pressure, speed, direction of movement, and for other scientific research, such as neutrino detection.
  Many different methods have been used since 1840, when the first scientific ice drilling expedition attempted to drill through the Unteraargletscher in the Alps. Two early methods were percussion, in which the ice is fractured and pulverized, and rotary drilling, a method often used in mineral exploration for rock drilling. In the 1940s, thermal drills began to be used; these drills melt the ice by heating the drill. Drills that use jets of hot water or steam to bore through ice soon followed. A growing interest in ice cores, used for palaeoclimatological research, led to ice coring drills being developed in the 1950s and 1960s, and there are now many different coring drills in use.
context_section_description: Commercially available rotary rigs have been used with large augers to drill in ice, generally for construction or for holes to gain access below the ice.  Although they are unable to produce cores, they have been intermittently used by US and Soviet scientific expeditions in the Antarctic.  In 2012, a British Antarctic Survey expedition to drill down to Lake Ellsworth, two miles below the surface of the Antarctic ice, used an Australian earth auger driven by a truck-mounted top drive to help drill two 300 m holes as part of the project, though in the event the project was delayed.
  Powered augers designed to drill large holes through ice for winter fishing may be mounted on a snow vehicle, or a tractor or sled; hole diameters can be as high as 350 mm.  These rigs have been produced commercially in both the US and the USSR, but are no longer in common use.
caption: 24-inch auger used by the US Navy in testing polar construction equipment in 1967
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