A Brief History Lesson in Deep Ice Core Drilling

In his article on rapid climate change (Physics Today, August 2003, page 30), Spencer Weart incorrectly credits Willi Dansgaard’s Danish team for augering the first deep ice core to reach the bottom of an active ice sheet from Camp Century, Greenland. This honor rests with B. Lyle Hansen and associates Herbert Ueda and Donald Garfield from the US Army Corps of Engineers’ Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, New Hampshire. In July 1966, after a five-year field effort, they reached a depth of 1387 meters.¹ One of us (Langway) was responsible for developing the international study program for the Camp Century ice core.²

The Hansen crew also drilled the second ice core ever to reach bottom ice, in January 1968, at a depth of 2164 meters, from Byrd Station, Antarctica.¹ Both core drillings were extensions of the successful US International Geophysical Year projects in Greenland and Antarctica (1957–58) to deep-core drill into polar ice sheets for scientific purposes.³ The IGY studies were proposed, initiated, and led by Henri Bader, chief scientist, under an interagency agreement with NSF.

It was data obtained in these early drilling projects that ultimately led to the discovery of rapid climate changes and served as the foundation and justification for the follow-up international, multidisciplinary Greenland Ice Sheet Program by researchers from the US, Denmark, and Switzerland.^4,5 It was also during the final three years (1979–81) of the GISP 10-year field and laboratory investigation that Danish drilling participants, led by Niels Gunderstrup and Sigfus Johnson, augered the 2037-meter-deep third ice core to reach the bottom of the ice sheet at Dye-3, in August 1981.

Weart replies: Historians should work hard to be accurate, and the same applies to those who would criticize historians. What I actually wrote, and which is true, was that in the 1970s the most convincing evidence for rapid climate change came from an ice core drilled by Willi Dansgaard’s Danish group in cooperation with Americans led by Chester Langway Jr. I never said that theirs was the first deep core. The constraints of a brief article, which attempted to cover a great deal of ground, left no space to describe how the drilling campaign was but one stage in a prolonged effort of heroic proportions—an effort that began in the 1950s and continues today. (Attentive readers might have noticed brief mentions in my photo captions.) I have written more about the drilling campaign in the essay cited in the article, available at http://www.aip.org/history/climate/rapid.htm. Those interested in ice drilling history are also urged to review and contribute to the additional but fragmentary information collected at http://www.aip.org/history/sloan/icedrill.

I am glad that Langway and Johannes Weertman have taken the trouble to draw attention to early deep ice drilling developments. Those named in their letter, and the many other institutions and people who contributed to that important task, deserve more recognition than they have received.