Hand Augers

The hand auger is the most basic of the mechanical drills and is driven from the surface by a series of extensions that are added as drilling proceeds into the ice. The drill, like all other coring drills, has to be retrieved each time a core section is recovered. IDDO has in inventory several types of hand augers: a newly developed IDDO (3-inch core) system, PICO (3 and 4-inch), and SIPRE (3-inch core). The IDDO and PICO augers can be configured to take either one-meter or ½-meter long cores, and the SIPRE takes cores ½ m long. The maximum depth to which hand augers without power assistance (see Sidewinder) can be used is approximately 20 meters.

Hand augers are typically operated by the investigator without assistance from IDDO drillers.