New Seismic Methods to Support Sea-Ice Platform Drilling

The ANtarctic geological DRILLing Program (ANDRILL) is currently a consortium of five nations (Germany, Italy, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America). By drilling, coring and analyzing stratigraphic archives along the Antarctic continental margin, ANDRILL pursues its primary goal of better understanding the role the Antarctic cryosphere plays in the global climate system (Harwood et al., 2006). The ANDRILL drilling system was developed to operate on both ice shelf and sea-ice platforms (Harwood et al., 2006; Falconer et al., 2007; Naish et al., 2007; Florindo et al., 2008). While thick multiyear sea ice provides stable and safe drilling platforms, identifying drilling targets in regions where these sea-ice conditions occur can be problematic due to a paucity of marine seismic reflection data because near-constant sea ice limits shop access (Fig. 1.). In response to this problem ANDRILL developed new over-sea-ice seismic methods to extend seismic reflection data coverage to regions of multiyear sea ice