At 13:00 on July 17, 2024, after 42 days of hard work, one of the important scientific expedition tasks of the second Qinghai-Tibet scientific expedition, the Nam Co International Continental Scientific Drilling Project, was successfully completed. The expedition team drilled seven boreholes from the bottom of Nam Co Lake and extracted 951.12 meters of core from the bottom of the lake. Among them, the drilling depth of the seventh hole reached 510.2 meters, once again breaking the record for the deepest lake drilling in my country.
Namtso Lake is located in the heart of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, between Lhasa and Nagqu. It is the second largest lake in Tibet. The lake surface is 4,718 meters above sea level and the maximum water depth is about 100 meters.
Wang Junbo, the leader of the expedition team and a researcher at the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said: After working day and night on the drilling platform, we have extracted nearly a thousand meters of cores, which can be used for multidisciplinary research such as paleoclimatology of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, paleoecology and evolution of lakes, and tripolar linkage. The research institutions participating in the Nam Co International Continental Scientific Drilling Program are from China, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and other countries, with more than 70 expedition members. The project preparation work is cumbersome and the cycle is long. It is very different from other International Continental Scientific Drilling Programs (ICDP projects) in the past in terms of organizational work. The main scientists in charge of the project undertook the design and implementation of the entire process, providing useful experience for the development of global ICDP projects.
The core is a sediment stored at the bottom of the lake, which contains a wealth of information on climate and environmental changes, including some important biological community components, such as diatoms. Zhu Liping, chief scientist of the Nam Co International Continental Scientific Drilling Program and researcher at the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, introduced that the final drilling depth reached 510.2 meters, exceeding the expected drilling plan. During the more than one month of drilling work, the scientific expedition team overcame severe weather such as strong winds and waves, and effectively solved the drilling technical difficulties caused by the sandy layers, aquifers, and hard mud layers they encountered. A total of more than 1,400 meters of drilling depth were completed, and nearly a thousand meters of effective cores were obtained, which will provide new scientific evidence for the study of climate and environmental changes on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau over the past million years.
The successful completion of the Namtso International Continental Scientific Drilling Project has also laid a good start for the second Qinghai-Tibet scientific expedition, the "One Plain, Two Lakes and Three Rivers" landmark scientific expedition in 2024, which will soon be fully implemented.
