French glacial drilling platform and management of the EPICA/BE-OI drilling ice archive

This IPEV project aims to give F2G platform staff access to the Concordia site for instrumental testing and to deal with the national ice archive. These two aspects of our missions have been entrusted to us by INSU through its label, and by a large national scientific community, covering very large fields areas like paleoclimatology, glaciology, seismology and astronomy…
The first mission concerns instrumental development (which can be seen as an extension of the former IPEV SUBGLACIOR 1202 project). In addition to the “robust” instruments that are part of F2G’s instrumental parc, we also have to provide the national scientific community with new instruments that address new scientific issues. These instruments (downhole loggers, new clean ice drill, new thermal corer, three of our current developments) need to be made reliable before they can be included in the range of tools available to the scientific community in response to ANR, ERC or other calls for projects. Commitments to large-scale projects require a tested, qualified and reliable range of instruments. To meet this requirement, we now know that Concordia’s temperature and pressure conditions make it an ideal “laboratory” for these instrumental qualifications.
The second mission concerns access to the ice archives EPICA and BE-OI stored at Concordia (EPICA was the subject of the former IPEV Archive EPICA 1203 project). The ice cores are an important tool to reconstruct our past climate through a multitude of analyses. For the European EPICA and BE-OI drilling projects, ¾ of the core is sent to Europe to be analysed, a quarter is kept as an archive on Concordia. The management of these archives remaining at Concordia includes :
– respond to sampling requests from various national and international groups, once approved by the EPICA and BE-OI Steering Committees.
– update the database of the samples constituting of the archive (positions, states, sampling, storage…) and organize the future storage in balloons cave.