Numlock Sunday: Christian Elliott on an audacious mission in Antarctica

Photo by Tetiana Grypachevska on Unsplash

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Christian Elliott, who wrote “Drilling on the Edge” for Science. Here's what I wrote about it:

Earlier this year a team of scientists successfully completed an audacious mission designed to extract ice cores from a remote and difficult-to-access site on the Canisteo Peninsula in Antarctica, with a U.S.-South Korea team attempting to extract an ice core that could illuminate what has historically been a mystery for researchers when it comes to glacial movement. It required a helicopter making 18 trips delivering gear to the worksite with a rapidly ticking 10-day clock to collect the ice cores amid a looming blizzard. The objective was 150 meters of ice core, and despite drilling issues such as fractured ice at 80 meters, a jammed drill, and generators that could be repaired only by watching YouTube videos beamed in by Starlink, on the last day they pulled off 150 meters o…