Scientific Drilling at El’gygytgyn Crater Lake, Chukotka, Northeast Siberia
March 21 - April 22, 2009 | Crater Lake El’gygytgyn, Russia
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Audio & PDF Now Available: Live from IPY! event from 9 April 2009 with Tim Martin and the research team on the Lake El'gygytgyn project in Siberia!
Although he grew up in several locations around the country, Tim Martin has always felt most at home in the natural world. His persistent curiosity led to his undergraduate study of the natural sciences and art at Goshen College and recently he completed his M.S. in teaching geosciences through Mississippi State University. Whether using recent data for weather forecasting, seismograms for mapping plate tectonics, or making real-time observations with an Internet accessible radio telescope, Mr. Martin has a passion for bringing real time science into his Earth Science classroom at Greensboro Day School. In his free time, he may be found "up close and personal" with earth science while rock climbing with his family. Mr. Martin is excited to be a Polar TREC teacher as he sees Lake El'gygytgyn as an important crossroads for geology, climatology, and planetary science. For more information about Mr. Martin, his class, and his previous earth Science adventures, visit Tim's Adventure Earth Science web site.
Julie Brigham-Grette was first inspired to study glacial geology when she was a college student at Albion College; in graduate school she became interested in the study of the paleoclimate history of Baffin Island and northern Alaska. Dr. Brigham-Grette is now a professor at the University of Massachusetts, where her research interests include studying the glacial and sea-level history of the Bering Strait region and the paleoclimatic history and change of the arctic and subarctic regions. Dr. Brigham-Grette hopes to excite students about the thrill of arctic research and what it can tell us about the history of climate change in the arctic regions and, consequently, the role of the polar regions in the global climate system. The climate record to be collected from El'gygytgyn Crater is relevant to everyone because of the unique story it contains about the terrestrial arctic response to a variety of natural forcings.
To learn more about a previous research expedition Dr. Brigham-Grette participated in to Lake El'gygytgyn (commonly called Lake E), you can visit Dr. Matt Nolan's (University of Alaska, Fairbanks) personal log from his trip there in 2000.
An international team of researchers from the United States, Germany, Russia, and Austria will be traveling to northeast Russia to conduct a large-scale scientific drilling project in Lake El'gygytgyn (pronounced el'geegitgin), a crater lake created 3.6 million years ago by the impact of a meteorite measuring about 18 km in diameter. The team will work on the lake ice throughout the winter, using a customized light-weight drill rig to obtain drill cores of layered muds from two sites in the lake.
Lake El'gygytgyn possesses a unique record of prehistoric climate change in the arctic. Because this basin was never glaciated, an uninterrupted sediment sequence of nearly 400 m (1312 feet) has accumulated at the bottom of the lake. Sediment cores collected during this expedition will be used to gather information about the history of the basin and compare it with similar paleoclimate records from other parts of the world, helping researchers to better understand the arctic's role in global climate change.
The team also plans to drill a short distance into the highly fractured rock layer below the sediments to learn more about meteorite impacts. Because of the particularly well-preserved rock structure in Lake El'gygytgyn, the team will be able to learn how igneous target rocks in this area respond to impacts, potentially providing the basis for important understanding related to cratering processes on Mars.
Geologists will use the data collected from the project to reconstruct past climate records on longer time scales, improve understanding of the climate system, and better inform scientists who predict future climate change. To learn more about the Lake El'gygytgyn drilling project, and other geological drilling projects worldwide, visit the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program or the Drilling, Observation and Sampling of the Earths Continental Crust (DOSECC) Websites.
Lake El'gygytgyn (pronounced el'geegitgin) is located 100 km (62 miles) north of the Arctic Circle and 250 km (155 miles) inland from the Arctic Ocean (67.5° N and 172° E) on the remote Chukchi Peninsula in the Russian Far East. This large lake measures 12 km (7.5 miles) wide and roughly 170 m (558 feet) deep. It is positioned on the continental divide between the Arctic Ocean and the Bering Sea in the middle of Anadyr Mountains. The team will live and work out of a temporary camp located on the west shore of the frozen lake ice.
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