Hercules Dome

Hercules Dome is located at ~86°S, 105°W, between the Horlick and Thiel Mountains, about 400 km from the South Pole. It was first identified as a promising site for a deep ice core on the basis of radar and shallow ice-core data collected by US International Trans‐Antarctic Scientific Expedition (ITASE) traverse in 2002-2003 (Jacobel and others, 2005).

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Topographic map of Hercules Dome, showing the location in Antarctica. Map by Ben Hills, University of Washington. Hercules Dome Summit is called "West Dome" in some earlier publications.
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Elevation profile and radar stratigraphy at West Dome collected by the site-selection team in 2019. Figure courtesy of Knut Christianson.

Hercules Dome actually comprises three distinct features, informally known as the “Hercules Dome Summit”, “East Dome” and “South Ridge”, which are anchored by subglacial ridges. Ongoing site-selection work with ice-penetrating radar, GPS surveys, and ice-flow modeling, show that Hercules Dome Summit is the best site (see Fudge et al. 2022 and Hills et al., in preparation, 2023).

Getting people and equipment to Hercules Dome for drilling is a major operation, which will likely involve at least one tractor-traverse all the way from McMurdo Station, about 1600 kilometers away. For much of the distance, we will be able to take advantage of the well-established route from McMurdo to South Pole.

The current logistics timeline has the first traverse to Hercules Dome starting no sooner than the 2025/2026 field season. View the project timeline for the latest schedule of anticipated activities. In the meanwhile, we’ll be working with the National Science Foundation, the Antarctic Support Contractor, and the U.S. Ice Drilling Program (IDP) engineers at the University of Madison-Wisconsin, in planning logistics.

Because drilling will not begin for a few years, there is ample time to consider getting involved in the science and in other aspects of the project.

US Ice Core Community Meeting 2025

The fourth annual US Ice Core Community Meeting (IceCOMM) will be held May 12-14, 2025, at the Coffman Memorial Union in the Mississippi Room in Minneapolis, MN. We appreciate support from the U.S. National Science Foundation. Abstract and early registration deadline is March 28. This meeting is intended for anyone interested in ice core science or related fields, including ice-core analysis, ice and/or subglacial drilling, glacier geophysics that supports or depends on ice core records, paleoclimate, and contemporary climate and ice sheet change. While this meeting is primarily oriented toward researchers in the US, international colleagues are welcome to attend. To ensure you do not miss announcements, we recommend joining the Hercules Dome mailing list.

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ICECReW 2025

The NSF Center for Oldest Ice Exploration (NSF COLDEX) and the Ice Core Early-Career Researchers Workshop (ICECReW) are partnering to host a writing workshop and retreat on May 15 and 16, 2025, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, after the US Ice Core Community Meeting (May 12-14). The theme of this year’s workshop is science writing, including making figures to communicate results, responding to peer reviews, how to structure papers, and deciding on journals and authorship. The workshop will also provide time for writing and peer review, and participants should bring materials they would like to work on (e.g., papers, dissertations, fellowship and grant applications). This workshop is intended for early-career researchers whose work contributes to polar sciences or paleoclimatology. Application Deadline: February 6, 2025.

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