On Wednesday, December 7, a press conference was held at the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute on the key tasks of the 68th RAE. Early next week, eight scientists from the Mining University, as well as four representatives from the AARI, will depart for Cape Town as part of the seasonal glacial-drilling team, and then travel to Vostok station in Antarctica. The participants in the expedition have an ambitious task - to bring to the surface of ice dating back about 1 million years.
According to Alexander Makarov, the AARI director, the further development of research on the White Continent involves a number of ambitious projects, the centre of which will be the new wintering complex - its commissioning is scheduled for 2025. But most of the research, including the third penetration to the subglacial Lake Vostok, located at a depth of more than 3700 meters, the collection of unique samples of relict water from it, and for the first time - bottom sediments, requires much more funding than today. Plus time, because of the short duration of the working season and the harsh climatic conditions in central Antarctica, the timing of experimental studies there is obviously more compressed than in a more comfortable environment.
However, some of the global projects scientists are about to undertake this season. For example, they plan to continue drilling a new borehole 5G-5 above Lake Vostok as part of the ancient ice research programme. Alexey Turkeyev, head of the glacio-drilling team and leading engineer of the Laboratory of Climate Change and Environment (LICOS) of the AARI, outlined the tasks faced by the researchers, the plan for organizing the work and the timing of its start and completion:
"Immediately after arrival in Antarctica and acclimatization, our team will start re-conservation of the drilling complex and geophysical studies of the existing well, which are necessary to make sure that there is no possibility of emergency situations. We will then engage in round-the-clock drilling operations. Despite adverse factors such as low oxygen levels in the air, we plan to complete it in early February 2023."
He noted that St Petersburg Mining University is working hard to train young professionals. On the one hand, they are engaged in scientific work within the framework of their thesis research, and on the other hand, they learn to operate and upgrade the station equipment independently, eliminate its possible malfunctions, in order to ensure future growth of polar research efficiency. This is not the first time that some of the guys will be travelling to the White Continent to test their designs and gain practical experience on the rig.
"To further study the subglacial Lake Vostok and the ancient ice, a rather large number of complex technical and engineering tasks need to be solved. This requires people, so we try to regularly increase the number of University staff involved in solving them, including by attracting promising young people. This season, five members of the expedition team are scientists under 30 years old, and one of them will travel to the White Continent for the first time. Every year the work being done is becoming more diverse, so we are involving not only drillers but also geologists, geophysicists, ecologists, electricians, mechanics and other specialists," said Alexey Bolshunov, a leading drilling specialist from the Mining University's Glacial Drilling Team.
As stressed Vladimir Lipenkov, candidate of geographical sciences, leading researcher, head of Laboratory LICOS, the ice sheet of Antarctica is a unique source of data on the gas composition of the atmosphere in the distant past. Its study is virtually the only way to accurately identify the anthropogenic impact on the atmosphere during the entire industrial era. On the basis of this data, it is possible to study the mechanisms of climate change, the factors that influence them and, as a result, to create predictive models of possible climate transformations and the impact of these changes on people's lives.
"For example, thanks to the ice core obtained earlier at Vostok station, we have already been able to reconstruct the Earth's climate over the last 440,000 years. That's four great climatic cycles: that is, the time during which our planet had four ice ages followed by an interglacial period up to the last one, the Holocene, in which we live. Together with a sample from Concordia station covering eight climate cycles, these studies have experimentally confirmed the link between greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and climate change. Now, climatologists want to understand why about a million years ago, the length of climate cycles has increased from 40 thousand to 100 thousand years," - said Vladimir Lipenkov.
In this regard, scientists plan to continue drilling well 5G-5 to take cores of ancient atmospheric ice over the lake Vostok. Previously extracted ice samples from this horizon were dated by AARI specialists using three independent methods, which showed that their age reaches 1 million 200 thousand years. The re-sampling of the cores, which are of such interest to scientists, became possible after the successful work carried out by employees of the Mining University and AARI to divert them from the main borehole.
One of the most significant research projects planned for the near future in Antarctica will be a study of the subglacial Lake Vostok. To achieve this, the Mining University is developing environmentally friendly methods of drilling an access well, opening up the lake, and sampling water and bottom sediments. This season, research work will be carried out and the results will form the basis for new technologies.
