Lake Ellsworth Corer: a novel, watertight corer for fine sediment and water interface cores

The corer was developed as part of the Subglacial LakeEllsworth project - an ambitious scientific mission to collect water and sediment samples from a lake buried beneath three kilometers of solid ice in Antarctica. During the development of the Lake Ellsworth probe, a novel and high performance mini corer design was developed. This enables the capture of distortion free cores and pore-waters even in extremely unconsolidated sediments at the water sediment interface. Furthermore, the sample is sealed in a water tight enclosure and therefore minimal disturbance occurs during retrieval. The sample cannot be washed out, and even the stratigraphy of the over lying water, fine muds and biofilms is preserved. The sampler is robust, can be aggressively cleaned, and withstands freezing. The latter greatly eases sample preservation, archiving and subsequent analysis. The corer offers advantages over current solutions by being able to reliably extract cores of extremely unconsolidated sediment. It was designed to operate in extreme, Antarctic conditions and hence is tolerant to freezing and sterilization procedures. National OceanographyCentre developed the corer in collaboration with Keen Marine Ltd. an has commercialisation interest.