The overarching goal of the Drilling Overdeepened Alpine Valleys (DOVE) project will be to date the age and extent of past glaciations. Formerly-glaciated areas are often characterized by deeply incised structures, often filled by Quaternary deposits. These buried troughs and valleys were formed by glacial overdeepening, likely caused by pressurized subglacial meltwater below warm-based glaciers. Results of this drilling campaign, supported by new dating technologies, will further provide critical data on 'how' and 'at which rate' glacial erosion affects such mountain ranges and their foreland. These processes are also of fundamental importance for evaluating the safety of radioactive waste disposal sites, which are planned in areas of former glaciations. Moreover, results of this project will fill gaps in the knowledge of paleoclimate and atmospheric circulation patterns during past glacial epochs and how these patterns affected ice build-up.
The operational data sets include the drill core documentation from the mobile Drilling Information System (mDIS), full round core scans, MSCL data sets, a preliminary core description and the geophysical downhole logging data that were acquired during and subsequent to the drilling operations. All downhole logs and core depth were subject to depth correction to a common depth master (cf. operational report for detailed information). The data are described by two scientific reports, the Operational Report (https://doi.org/10.48440/ICDP.5068.001) and the Explanatory Remarks on the Operational Datasets (https://doi.org/10.48440/ICDP.5068.002).
Glacial contribution to eustatic sea level rise is currently dominated by loss of the smaller glaciers
and ice caps, about 40% of which are tidewater glaciers that lose mass through calving ice bergs.
The most recent predictions of glacier contribution to sea level rise over the next century are
strongly dependent upon models that are able to project individual glacier mass changes globally
and through time. A relatively new promising technique for monitoring glacier calving is through the
use of passive seismology. CalvingSEIS aims to produce high temporal resolution, continuous
calving records for the glaciers in Kongsfjord, Svalbard, and in particular for the Kronebreen glacier
laboratory through innovative, multi-disciplinary monitoring techniques combining fields of
seismology and bioacoustics to detect and locate individual calving events autonomously and
further to develop methods for the quantification of calving ice volumes directly from the seismic
and acoustic signals.