Installing the cellar

The team at Crary Ice Rise have lowered the ‘cellar’ into a 3m pit dug down into the ice.

The cellar must be in place before hot water drilling gets underway, and is an important part of our AIDD (Antarctic Intermediate Depth Drill) system. The framing provides a space for equipment to sit below the drill rig at the ice surface.

With the cellar installed we are a step closer to drilling our sediment core from the bedrock below the 500m ice sheet!

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Deepest-ever rock core extracted from under Antarctic ice sheet

Deepest-ever rock core extracted from under Antarctic ice sheet

18 February 2026

Analyses will help to reveal how far the West Antarctic Ice Sheet retreated in the past — and what it might do in the future.

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Scientists Drilled Into Antarctic Ice Until They Met Bedrock, Then Got A 228-Meter Sample Of Sediment

Scientists Drilled Into Antarctic Ice Until They Met Bedrock, Then Got A 228-Meter Sample Of Sediment

18 February 2026

Scientists have just got their hands on a 228-metre (748-foot) core sample from the muddy bedrock beneath West Antarctica’s chunky ice sheets. Inside the record-breaking sample, they discovered fossils of marine organisms that date from a time when this area was an open, ice-free ocean.

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