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Significant upgrades to the Rapid Air Movement (RAM) Drill were developed and tested by the US Ice Drilling Program in 2016 through 2020 for the U.S. National Science Foundation. The design of the system leverages the existing infrastructure of the RAM Drill with the goal of greatly reducing the logistical burden of deploying the drill while maintaining the ability to drill an access hole in firn and ice to 100m in 40 min or less. In this paper, characteristics of the drill are described, along with a description of the drill performance during the testing at Raven Camp in Greenland and at WAIS Divide Camp in Antarctica. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the course of the 2014/15 and 2015/16 austral summer seasons, the South Pole Ice Core project recovered a 1751m deep ice core at the South Pole. This core provided a high-resolution record of paleoclimate conditions in East Antarctica during the Holocene and late Pleistocene. The drilling and core processing were completed using the new US Intermediate Depth Drill system, which was designed and built by the US Ice Drilling Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In this paper, we present and discuss the setup, operation, and performance of the drill system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]