DOSECC Siberian Drilling Project

WEST fellow Colby Neuman led a group of 4-6th grade students from Ensign Elementary on a field trip to learn about Utah’s involvement in a unique scientific collaboration. The students visited a site in Kearns, UT where they were given a preview of a highly specialized drilling rig that is headed for a remote part of Siberia, deep in northeast Russia.

This is a major international project, involving scientists and funding from the United Stated, Russia, Germany and Austria. DOSECC (Drilling, Observation and Sampling of the Earth's Continental Crust) was charged with the engineering and construction of the deep drilling rig.

The destination for the rig is Lake El’gygytgyn, a meteorite impact crater 60 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Formed 3.6 million years ago, Lake E. is significant because it will yield data from the longest, most time-continuous sediment record of environmental change in the Arctic. The Ensign Elementary students were among the final visitors to the DOSECC field-testing site before the rig modules will be shipped to Siberia, where the rig will be moved through a vast roadless region via covered snow sleds to Lake E. Drilling will commence in Spring 2009, using the frozen lake ice as a platform.

The ideas and concepts the students were exposed to included geography, sedimentology, international scientific collaboration, arctic climate, structural engineering and more. Along with talking with DOSECC engineers, the kids were able to meet and ask questions of the leading American scientist on the project, Dr. Julie Brigham-Grette, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

DOSECC is a not-for-profit corporation whose mission is to provide leadership and technical support in subsurface sampling and monitoring technology for addressing topics of scientific and societal importance. www.dosecc.org

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