Drilling under water High-Performance Coring Rig (HiPerCoRig): TU Braunschweig supports GFZ with special drilling rig

The GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences has taken over the HiPerCoRig (High-Performance Coring Rig) on permanent loan from the Technische Universität Braunschweig. With the delivery of four containers to the GFZ’s branch office at the KTB Deep Crustal Lab in Windischeschenbach, Germany, the GFZ’s research infrastructure has been expanded to include a highly specialized tool for scientific drilling.

The HiPerCoRig is a lake drilling system developed for extracting drill cores at water depths of up to 200 metres. It consists of a modular drilling platform including anchoring, a drilling rig with an innovative, hydraulically driven hammer-drilling system, and supply boats. The development was jointly applied for by the TU Braunschweig and the Bochum University of Applied Sciences, with the support of the German Research Drilling Consortium, GESEP e.V., and financed by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

HiPerCoRig enables core drilling to depths of up to 100 metres in loosely consolidated sediments. This opens up new avenues of research for paleoclimatology, limnology, and geosciences, particularly for accessing climate and environmental archives on land, in lakes, and in shallow marine regions. After its first use at Lake Mondsee in 2019, HiPerCoRig has proven its capabilities in further drilling projects in Lake Constance, Lake Hallstatt, and Bora Bora, in which GFZ researchers were also actively involved.

On a non-profit basis, the GFZ Section Geomechanics and Scientific Drilling will make HiPerCoRig available to national and international research teams of scientists who require complete and continuous core drilling to achieve their scientific goals. The projects have to cover transport and operating costs as well as a maintenance fee, which serves to ensure the long-term sustainability of the drilling rig.

Publication:

Harms, U., Raschke, U., Anselmetti, F. S., Strasser, M., Wittig, V., Wessels, M., Schaller, S., Fabbri, S. C., Niederreiter, R., and Schwalb, A.: Hipercorig – an innovative hydraulic coring system recovering over 60 m long sediment cores from deep perialpine lakes, Sci. Dril., 28, 29–41.
https://doi.org/10.5194/sd-28-29-2020, 2020

Logbook drilling campaign

Series of logbook articles on the international research drilling campaign at Lake Constance 2019