The HiPerCoRig is a lake drilling system developed for the recovery of drill cores at water depths of up to 200 meters. It consists of a modular drilling platform including anchoring, a drilling unit with an innovative hydraulically powered hammer drilling system, as well as support vessels. The development was jointly initiated by TU Braunschweig and Bochum University of Applied Sciences with support from the German Scientific Drilling Consortium, GESEP e.V., and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

HiPerCoRig enables core drilling down to depths of up to 100 meters in poorly consolidated, i.e., loose sediments. This opens up new research opportunities in paleoclimatology, limnology, and the geosciences, particularly for accessing climate and environmental archives on land, in lakes, and in shallow marine regions. After its first deployment at Mondsee in 2019, HiPerCoRig has successfully demonstrated its performance in further drilling projects at Lake Constance, Hallstätter See, and on Bora Bora, with GFZ researchers actively involved.

The GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences has taken over HiPerCoRig (High-Performance Coring Rig) as a permanent loan from TU Braunschweig. GFZ’s Section 4.2 (Geomechanics and Scientific Drilling) provides HiPerCoRig on a non-profit basis to national and international research teams whose scientific goals require complete and continuous core drilling. Projects cover transportation and operating costs as well as a maintenance fee, which ensures the long-term sustainability of the drilling system.

Contact: Thomas Wiersberg

References:

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.