We describe a new drill for glaciers and ice sheets. Instead of drilling down into the ice via mechanical action, our drill melts its way down into the ice. Our goal is simply to pull a cable of temperature sensors on a one-way trip down to the ice-bed interface. Under laboratory conditions, our melt-tip drill has an efficiency of ~35% against a theoretical maximum penetration rate of ~12 m/hr. Under field condition, our efficiency is just ~15 %. Clearly room for improvement!

It is important to understand atmospheric chemistry over Antarctica under a changing climate. Thus snow collected on a traverse from the coast to Dome A was used to investigate variations in snow chemistry. The non-sea-salt fractions of K⁺, Mg²⁺, and Ca²⁺ are associated with terrestrial inputs, and nssCl⁻ is from HCl. In general, proportions of non-sea-salt fractions of ions to the totals are higher in the interior areas than on the coast, and the proportions are higher in summer than in winter.

The deposition and preservation of NO₃⁻ across East Antarctica was investigated. On the coast, dry deposition contributes 27–44 % of the NO₃⁻ fluxes, and the linear relationship between NO₃⁻ and snow accumulation rate suggests a homogeneity of atmospheric NO₃⁻ levels. In inland snow, a relatively weak correlation between NO₃⁻ and snow accumulation was found, indicating that NO₃⁻ is mainly dominated by post-depositional processes. The coexisting ions are generally less influential on snow NO₃⁻.