ANDRILL (ANtarctic geological DRILLing) Drilling System – A Modified UDR1200 Drill Rig for Antarctic Use

The ANtarctic geological DRILLing Program (ANDRILL; www.andrill.org), an international collaboration between scientists, drillers, engineers, educators, and technicians from Germany, Italy, New Zealand and the United States working together in the spirit of the 4th International Polar Year (IPY), successfully completed the drilling phase of its second project in early December 2007. This new drillcore in the western Ross Sea complements and expands the results from ANDRILL’s first successful drilling season. The primary objectives of ANDRILL were to recover and examine stratigraphic records of sedimentary rock from the Antarctic continental margin that document key steps in Antarctica's Cenozoic climatic and glacial history, and reveal events in the development of the Transantarctic Mountains and West Antarctic Rift System(http://www.andrill.org). ANDRILL's two new stratigraphic sections are guiding our understanding of how fast, how large, and how frequent were glacial and interglacial changes in the Antarctic region, and will help establish, through correlation to existing records and integration with climate and ice sheet models, how these local changes relate to regional and global events.