AMP'D Blog: Karen Lloyd

One thing I love about field work is that no matter how many fancy degrees you have, no matter how smart you think you are, nature will find a way to lay you low. This permafrost drilling project was no different. We figured the rocks would be our downfall. But it was metal that took us down in the end.

Despite having worked on permafrost in the past, I had never actually drilled into permafrost myself. So, I went with Tatiana Vishnivetskaya and Andrey Abramov, my well-seasoned permafrost scientist colleagues, to do reconnaissance in the summer and try to anticipate any problems that would arise when we did the real drilling under snowcover in the early spring. 

​Drill bit for the core barrel.

Karen and Donato brainstorm a solution to the breaking rods.

We found rocks – lots of them. Enough to potentially stop even our powerful drill bits (pictured below).

​So that summer, we poked around for the most rock-free zone and marked the locations on our GPS. When we finally got to do the drilling in March 2021 (a year late due to covid), we were ready for the rocks to do their worst. 
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After the first two days of drilling at Bayelva, Julia Boike’s twenty-year permafrost monitoring site named after the river that surrounds it, the rocks put up a fight, but Andrey’s masterful drilling techniques dragged up core section after core section, often drilling holes straight through big rocks. We discovered that our core liners were too short to fit inside the core barrels, despite sending a million emails back and forth with measurements, but some swift Leatherman work from Donato Giovannelli on site resulted in a core liner extension that worked great for the rest of the trip. After a couple of days of drilling, we had to give up on the first hole before we got to the full permafrost depth (~2 m) because we hit bedrock. There just wasn’t enough soil to drill.

So, we scoured the new wonderfully detailed geological maps made by the Norwegian Polar Institute at night and picked out sites that might have deeper soil depth for the next day.

Drilling at Bayelva. Pictured are Donato Giovannelli, James Bradley, and Andrey Abramov.

​By this time, Christian Rasmussen and I had become proficient at snow pit digging, so when we found a new location, we dug a pit into the snow quickly and started anew. Everything was going great. The sun was shining, the drill wasn’t over-pressured, the cores weren’t freezing to the ground, and I had finally mastered using the unwieldy giant pipe wrench to unscrew the drill bit and pull out the core liner. It was the perfect setting for a theatrical downfall. 

With no warning, the 3 inch screw on the top of the drilling rod sheared clean through, leaving the broken fragment screwed deep within the drill head. At first, we were afraid the whole drilling project was over, but Donato “Michaelangelo’ed” the broken fragment out of the drill head by hooking it with a screwdriver. 

We spent the rest of the day trying to troubleshoot the problem of the sheared screw. Looking at the broken fragment seemed to suggest that the metal itself was bad and had failed even though it was not experiencing much torque. ​

Core barrel drilling into wet material.

We tried another core barrel. It retrieved one core and then broke on the next one. We tried another core barrel. That one broke immediately. Then another. Same thing. We were running out of core barrels. We managed to identify one drill rod that was capable of retrieving cores without breaking. But we still needed a core barrel with a functional screw. 
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This is when my PhD student, Katie Sipes, radioed in to say, “I don’t know if you guys need this or not, but I know how to weld.” Welding, it turns out, was the answer. It ended up being easier just to get the machine shop guy to cut the screw off of the good rod and weld it onto a core barrel. So, Katie’s skills were kept in reserve for another trip. But now we had a working rig. 

​We started the next day with high hopes at our second location, Kvadehuken, a starkly beautiful peninsula that apparently translates to “bad corner” from old Dutch.

​Here, we managed to drill down to bedrock past the all important 2 meters permafrost depth. Success! I did a full-on happy dance when we hit 2 m. That was the goal of the trip and we had achieved it. But, we were drilling in a shallow brine lake, so the cores were coming up wet, which is fairly dissatisfying when one is going for the frozen stuff. But I am told that it still qualifies as permafrost because it is below the freezing point of water. Whatever. I don’t make the rules.

Karen delighted to reach the permafrost. Success!

​But to feel satisfied, we really needed something with rock hard ice in it. Something that looked like the permafrost of our dreams. 

Samples brought back to the University of Tennessee for future study.

For that, we went back to Bayelva, closer to the Climate Change tower run by the National Research Center of Italy. Here, a core barrel and drilling rods refrained from breaking long enough that we managed to hit the jackpot. An ice layer that shone like diamonds, and then frozen soil beneath. The ice line was right at 2m, where Julia’s data predicted it would be. ​

​Once again, field work showed me the limits of my own ability to predict all possible outcomes. I went to Svalbard fearing rocks, but sheared metal ended up being our limiting factor. Despite all the tough breaks, through the ingenuity and good spirits of our team and the amazing people in Ny Ålesund, we still managed to bring back a freezer full of samples!

L-R: James Bradley, Donato Giovannelli, Karen Lloyd and Andrey Abramov.