Jet Drilling (Ice)

Jet drilling, more often called hot-water drilling, melts a borehole through glacier ice and ice shelves with a high-pressure stream of heated water rather than a mechanical bit. A pump circulates water heated to near boiling through a nozzle that descends as it melts ice, opening holes up to a kilometer or more deep in hours. The technique gives clean, rapid access for deploying instruments into subglacial lakes, ocean cavities beneath ice shelves, and grounding-line zones, as used in the WISSARD and Thwaites access programs. Unlike coring, it destroys the ice column, so it is chosen for access and oceanographic sampling, not for recovering ice cores.