Villum Research Station Site 1

Created: 2021-10-27 16:43:26
Modified: 2022-03-10 12:10:26

Borehole background and setting 

Villum Research Station (VRS) Site 1 (SN1) is located at Station Nord, eastern North Greenland. Aarhus University operates VRS (https://villumresearchstation.dk/). Two 20 m deep boreholes were drilled in August 2014 in collaboration with the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS), establishing permafrost monitoring activities as part of VRS' climate monitoring program. UNIS was asked to establish the sites as the closest neighboring institution with a permafrost drill rig and the possibility to transport it to Station Nord when VRS was established in 2014. Wesley Farnsworth, Graham Gilbert, and Ullrich Neumann (Kolibri Geo Services) drilled the boreholes and collected the samples. SN1 and its sister site, SN2, are located ca. 100 m west of the VRS atmospheric observatory (sometimes called monitoring house in other literature). Both boreholes are in raised beach deposits, but SN1 is located slightly higher in elevation (36 m a.s.l.) on flat ground, while SN2 (27 m a.s.l.) is located downslope and approximately 70 m west of SN1. The sites were chosen to capture the effects of local variation in snow thickness. Snow depth measurements made by probing at the boreholes in February and May 2015 indicate 30-50 cm more snow accumulates at SN2 compared to SN1. Vegetation and soil fauna on the peninsula is limited, with a survey of ten plots south of Station Nord indicating a vegetation cover of less than 20% percent (Krogh et al., 2020).  

Drilling information and instrumentation details 

A hydraulic-powered portable drill rig owned by UNIS was used with 1 m long and 42 mm diameter core barrels (Christiansen et al., 2021) to obtain core samples during the borehole drilling in August 2014. Approximately 6 m of core and 5 m of unconsolidated samples were obtained from SN1, and 5 m of core and 12 m of unconsolidated samples were obtained from SN2. Some strata disintegrated during drilling or were too rocky to be cut through with the coring drill bits, precluding complete core recovery of the full 20 m borehole lengths. Both boreholes were cased with steel pipe and are instrumented with GeoPrecision thermistor strings with integrated data loggers. Temperatures are recorded every six hours (0:00, 06:00, 12:00, 18:00 UTC) at 20 depths: 0 m, 0.05 m, 0.1 m, 0.25 m, 0.5 m, 0.75 m, 1.0 m, 1.5 m, 2.0 m, 2.5 m, 3.0 m, 4.0 m, 6.0 m, 8.0 m, 10.0 m, 12.0 m, 14.0 m, 16.0 m, 18.0 m, and 20.0 m. Each thermistor has a resolution of 0.065°C and accuracy of ±0.25 °C at 0 °C. 

Associated data

All of the data related to this borehole, including core photographs, gravimetric moisture content, salinity, and freezing point depression data, can be obtained through our Zenodo dataset: 10.5281/zenodo.6335754

References 

Krogh, P. H., Gjelstrup, P., Hansen, O. L. P., & Høye, T. T. (2020). Soil fauna of Princess Ingeborg Peninsula. Paper presented at the 3nd Workshop on Field Studies at the Villum Research Station (VRS). 

Christiansen, H. H., Gilbert, G., Neumann, U., Demidov, N., Guglielmin, M., Isaksen, K., . . . Boike, J. (2021). Ground ice content, drilling methods and equipment and permafrost dynamics in Svalbard 2016-2019 (PermaSval). In SESS Report 2019-The State of Environmental Science in Svalbard. doi:10.5281/zenodo.4294095