hot water to drill through ice

The team will have just 24 hours to access the lake before the borehole refreezes.

Although hot-water drilling technology has been used extensively by Antarctic scientists on previous experiments, at 3 km this will be the deepest borehole ever made this way.

The hot water drill is designed to cope with extraordinary environmental conditions.

It needs to operate continuously for 3 days to create a 360 mm wide borehole through the ice into the lake.

At -20°C freezing inside the borehole reduces its diameter by 0.6 cm per hour.

Ice and water from the hole need to be recycled as drilling fluid to minimise the potential for contamination.

design and build

Engineer Andy Tait, from British Antarctic Survey, describes the challenge of building and deploying a hot water drill