NSF 13-503: Ice Coring and Drilling Program for the Office of Polar Programs

Program Solicitation NSF 13-503

National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs      Division of Antarctic Sciences

Full Proposal Deadline(s) (due by 5 p.m. proposer's local time):

     January 22, 2013

Important Information And Revision Notes

A revised version of the NSF Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide (PAPPG), NSF 13-1, was issued on October 4, 2012 and is effective for proposals submitted, or due, on or after January 14, 2013. Please be advised that the guidelines contained in NSF 13-1 apply to proposals submitted in response to this funding opportunity. Proposers who opt to submit prior to January 14, 2013, must also follow the guidelines contained in NSF 13-1.

Please be aware that significant changes have been made to the PAPPG to implement revised merit review criteria based on the National Science Board (NSB) report, National Science Foundation's Merit Review Criteria: Review and Revisions. While the two merit review criteria remain unchanged (Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts), guidance has been provided to clarify and improve the function of the criteria. Changes will affect the project summary and project description sections of proposals. Annual and final reports also will be affected.

A by-chapter summary of this and other significant changes is provided at the beginning of both the Grant Proposal Guide and the Award & Administration Guide.

Please note that this program solicitation may contain supplemental proposal preparation guidance and/or guidance that deviates from the guidelines established in the Grant Proposal Guide.

Summary Of Program Requirements

General Information

Program Title:

Ice Coring and Drilling Program for the Office of Polar Programs

Synopsis of Program:

The Office of Polar Programs (OPP) at the National Science Foundation (NSF) requests proposals from interested groups to support current and future ice drilling activities. Current NSF ice drilling programs include development of drill systems that can obtain ice cores, embed instruments in the ice, carry out various types of borehole logging, and provide access to the ice sheet bed.

Specifically, proposals are requested for the continuation of the Ice Drilling Program Office (IDPO), which helps coordinate long-term and short-term planning for ice coring and drilling projects, in collaboration with the science community, and to be the principal supplier of ice drilling and coring support and expertise for NSF-funded research. The IDPO will work with an Ice Drilling Development Office (IDDO) (through a sub-contract arrangement unless a single awardee proposes to execute both IDPO and IDDO activities). IDDO will provide the engineering design support for new drilling systems as well as the operation and maintenance of existing systems. The IDPO is expected to play a proactive role in the community to encourage innovation in ice drilling technologies in response to community needs and will help guide the development of new drilling designs as requested by the research community and funded by NSF.

Interested parties must propose to this solicitation with a plan to provide for both of the current functions (the IDPO and IDDO) under a single umbrella group with sub-awards as appropriate. These entities will be expected to work closely together and to partner, as appropriate, with scientists in the submission of research proposals.

Through a close collaboration with NSF the successful proponent will be expected to successfully manage and carry out drilling activities in varying mixtures of ice, rock, and sediment. Requirements for drilling activities will be derived both from the long range science plan developed by the IDPO as well as research proposals funded by NSF. Collaborations with international partners and scientists funded by other sources are encouraged. The awardee from this solicitation will be integral to the planning and execution of all aspects of the drilling activities that OPP supports.

Cognizant Program Officer(s):

Please note that the following information is current at the time of publishing. See program website for any updates to the points of contact.

• Julie M. Palais, Program Director, Antarctic Glaciology, telephone: (703) 292-8033, email: jpalais@nsf.gov

Applicable Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) Number(s):

• 47.078 --- Office of Polar Programs

Award Information

Anticipated Type of Award: Cooperative Agreement

Estimated Number of Awards: 1 A single award for the establishment of an Ice Drilling Program Office (IDPO) and an Ice Drilling Development Office (IDDO) (through a subcontract arrangement if they are not at the same institution).

Anticipated Funding Amount: $ 3,750,000. The overall duration of the award from this solicitation will be five years with an anticipated funding level up to $ 3,750,000 per year pending availability of funds and depending on the drilling needs of the ice drilling community. Base level funding for support and drill system development and modification should not exceed $ 2,900,000 per year. Actual annual funding for the ice drilling enterprise will depend on activities outlined in the Annual Program Plan.

Since IDPO/IDDO provides support to many programs at NSF, if a new award is made during the year based on the submission of unanticipated, unsolicited proposal after the annual program plan has been submitted and the annual funding action has been released, additional funding for IDPO/IDDO will be handled as a supplement to the Cooperative Agreement by the NSF program funding the new award.

Eligibility Information

Organization Limit:

The categories of proposers eligible to submit proposals to the National Science Foundation are identified in the Grant Proposal Guide, Chapter I, Section E.

PI Limit:

None Specified

Limit on Number of Proposals per Organization:

None Specified

Limit on Number of Proposals per PI:

None Specified

Proposal Preparation and Submission Instructions

A. Proposal Preparation Instructions

• Letters of Intent: Not Applicable

• Preliminary Proposal Submission: Not Applicable

• Full Proposals:
  • Full Proposals submitted via FastLane: NSF Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide, Part I: Grant Proposal Guide (GPG) Guidelines apply. The complete text of the GPG is available electronically on the NSF website at: https://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=gpg.
  • Full Proposals submitted via Grants.gov: NSF Grants.gov Application Guide: A Guide for the Preparation and Submission of NSF Applications via Grants.gov Guidelines apply (Note: The NSF Grants.gov Application Guide is available on the Grants.gov website and on the NSF website at: https://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=grantsgovguide)

B. Budgetary Information

• Cost Sharing Requirements: Inclusion of voluntary committed cost sharing is prohibited.

• Indirect Cost (F&A) Limitations: Not Applicable

• Other Budgetary Limitations: Not Applicable

C. Due Dates

• Full Proposal Deadline(s) (due by 5 p.m. proposer's local time):

       January 22, 2013

Proposal Review Information Criteria

Merit Review Criteria: National Science Board approved criteria. Additional merit review considerations apply. Please see the full text of this solicitation for further information.

Award Administration Information

Award Conditions: Standard NSF award conditions apply.

Reporting Requirements: Additional reporting requirements apply. Please see the full text of this solicitation for further information.

Agency Contacts

Other Information

I. Introduction

Studies of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and the records of Earth history they contain in the form of ice cores, remain a relatively recent field of science. Much has been learned over the last 50 years from ice cores recovered from the inland regions of both polar ice sheets by different national and international research teams. In addition to drilling polar glaciers for the historical record contained in the ice, other scientists have drilled through the ice sheets to get to the base for geologic studies or to embed detectors in the ice for astrophysical measurements.

Ice cores from polar ice sheets and ice caps provide excellent records of environmental change because of their high temporal resolution and the large number of environmental variables and indicators recorded in the ice. Ice core records have provided essential data that have led to great advances in the understanding of global change and the behavior of earth systems. This is evidenced by the pervasiveness of ice core data in the global change peer-reviewed literature.

Prior to 2008 a contract for ice drilling services was awarded to a group that managed the planning, development, procurement, and operation of ice-drilling equipment for projects supported by the Office of Polar Programs. These contracts also supported planning for logistical coordination of ice drilling activities in both polar regions and in some high-altitude locations.

In 2008 NSF changed the organizational and funding model for supporting ice drilling so that the science community could coordinate and prioritize their drilling efforts. NSF released the solicitation (NSF 08-555) and in October 2008 awarded Cooperative Agreements to support the institutions that were selected from the competition. The new model of having an Ice Drilling Program Office (IDPO) to coordinate the science planning activities of the community and an Ice Drilling Development Office (IDDO), overseen by IDPO, providing the engineering and drilling expertise to implement the projects planned by the science community has been in effect now for 4 years. IDPO, in collaboration with IDDO, works with the science community to develop new drilling tools and operate and maintain current systems. This new structure is designed to be responsive to community needs and to improve planning of new projects.

This new solicitation encourages scientists and engineers, to establish teams to work together as an integrated organization to support the ice drilling activities of NSF's Office of Polar Programs and others. The successful proposal from this solicitation will be awarded under a cooperative agreement with NSF to support the drilling needs of NSF-sponsored researchers.

In response to the recently released report from the U.S. Antarctic Program Blue Ribbon Panel ("More and Better Science in Antarctica through increased Logistical Effectiveness"), we envision taking the opportunity over the next several years to encourage the development of new technologies for ice drilling and in-situ borehole instrumentation which will allow off-ice activities in addition to those currently underway or planned for Antarctic field work. This could include things such as new tool development, modifications to the Deep Ice Sheet Coring (DISC) drill and other existing drills, development of procedures for accessing a wet-based ice sheet or research into the search for new drill fluids, to name a few examples.

Current Drilling Systems

Currently there are numerous systems available for drilling boreholes and for collection of ice cores. A complete inventory of the currently available systems can be found on the following web site:

http://www.icedrill.org/equipment/index.shtml

and is also attached as Table 1 in the Program Description section of this solicitation. Available systems include those that produce boreholes and numerous other drills that collect various diameter ice cores. Ice core drills include various types of hand augers and electromechanical drills. There is also a matrix showing all of the currently available systems and their availability for projects now and into the future:

http://www.icedrill.org/equipment/matrix.shtml

Recently much effort has gone into development and/or acquisition of several new drilling systems (http://www.icedrill.org/equipment/development.shtml). These development projects include the replicate drilling system and the intermediate drilling system, among others.

Future Drilling Systems

In April 2011 IDPO hosted an Interdisciplinary Science Community Planning Workshop whose goal was to identify future Arctic and Antarctic drilling/coring sites, the ice drilling technology that will be needed, and the timeline over the coming decade to be able to implement these projects (http://www.icedrill.org/science-planning-workshop-2011/index.html). Interest in sampling polar ice sheets and their sub-strata, without continuous coring, has been a topic of discussion for many years among geologists, glaciologists and biologists. In order to more rapidly obtain samples beneath the ice sheet and to emplace instruments within these boreholes, the possibility of developing a rapid, or fast-mechanical access drill has been discussed at a number of meetings and workshops in the past including the April 2011 workshop hosted by IDPO. The discussions at the April 2011 workshop built on the previous Fastdrill workshop that was held at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2002:

http://www.es.ucsc.edu/~tulaczyk/fastdrill.htm

Among other ice-drilling activities, planning is already underway to develop and acquire the necessary intermediate-depth logging winches and other equipment to enable a wide variety of borehole logging measurements:

http://www.icedrill.org/equipment/development.shtml#winch

In addition to U.S. planning for future drilling programs, the International Partnerships in Ice Core Sciences (IPICS) group has identified four major scientific projects to be addressed in the coming years, as well as drilling and implementation plans to meet these objectives. These projects are:

• The oldest ice core: A 1.5 million year record of climate and greenhouse gases from Antarctica (a time period where Earth's climate shifted from 40,000 year to 100,000 year cycles);
  
• The last interglacial and beyond: A northwest Greenland deep ice core drilling project (a deep ice core in Greenland with an intact record of the last interglacial period);
  
• The IPICS 40,000 year network: A bipolar record of climate forcing and response;
  
• The IPICS 2k Array: A network of ice core climate and climate forcing records for the last two millennia;

A suite of requirements for drilling and coring capabilities to support these scientific goals has also been articulated (http://www.pages.unibe.ch/ipics/data/IPICS_drilling.pdf) and, although many of these requirements can be met with currently available technologies, some will require the extension of current systems or the development and testing of new ones. Some additional challenges that have been articulated include:

• Identifying an acceptable, appropriate, inert drill fluid with no undesirable physical or chemical characteristics (currently being worked on by IDPO);
  
• Successfully coring and recovering basal ice close to or at its pressure melting point in a deep, fluid-filled hole (in discussion by IDDO);
  
• Developing an increased ability to produce good-quality core through the brittle ice zone in polar ice caps and to handle, transport and store it without inducing additional damage;
  
• Acquiring replicate ice samples at specific depths or intervals of interest (in development as part of the WAIS Divide project);
  
• Creating successful strategies for encountering pressurized water at the bed;
  
• Sampling bedrock at the bottom of the hole;
  
• Identifying and standardizing a reliable lightweight, portable dry/wet drill system capable of reaching from several hundred to a thousand meters;
  
• Developing procedures to handle, transport and store core in a way that it preserves as much of its initial information as possible.

The successful awardee(s) will be expected to work with the U.S. research community and IPICS to further develop existing activities and achieve the goals articulated above. The involvement of international partners is already well advanced in the ice drilling community but the Blue Ribbon Panel recommended that NSF should look for new ways to "pursue additional opportunities for international cooperation in shared logistical support as well as scientific endeavors".

II. Program Description

Statement of Work

Project Description and Management

The Office of Polar Programs (OPP) at the National Science Foundation (NSF) requests proposals for the continuation of the Ice Drilling Program Office, an organization that provides scientific leadership and oversight of ice coring and drilling activities funded by the NSF. Working in partnership with the IDPO is an Ice Drilling Development Office (IDDO), a group of engineers providing the design support for new drilling systems as well as the operation and maintenance of existing systems (including the Deep Ice Sheet Coring (DISC) Drill). This solicitation requires a single institution to propose for the combined activity or a single institution with a sub-award for the IDDO. The successful awardee must demonstrate an in-depth understanding of current, state-of-the-art ice drilling technologies for recovery of ice-cores and producing boreholes and must demonstrate the ability to successfully carry out drilling activities in varying mixtures of ice, rock, and sediment. Project planning and management is a critical component of this activity.

The Ice Drilling Program Office (IDPO) will play a proactive role in the community to encourage innovation in ice core drilling technologies in response to community needs and will help guide the Ice Drilling Development Office (IDDO) group to develop new drilling designs as requested by the research community and funded by NSF. These entities will be expected to work closely together in a seamless partnership, and collaborate with others, as appropriate, on the submission of research and development proposals for new technology.

Requirements for drilling activities and development of new drilling tools will be, to a large degree, derived from research activities funded by NSF (including activities with international partners). However, the successful awardee will also be expected to work closely with the community to develop cutting edge ice core drilling technologies and shall partner, when appropriate, with scientists on the submission of research proposals seeking funding for these developments. The successful group will be required to work closely with investigators, other agencies, contractors, and other national programs to prepare operational plans to support ice-drilling activities worldwide. During proposal development, investigators will work with the awardee to establish project requirements and costs to be included in proposals submitted to NSF for review.

The awardee will be expected to work within the cycle of OPP's grant award process. If NSF determines that a project is supportable, then the Ice Drilling Program Office will be formally directed to devote IDDO resources to implement the work described in the successful proposal. A primary task will be to work with principal investigators to prepare detailed project plans that will include the project schedule, milestones, costs (including life-cycle costs), and resource requirements needed for completion. An integrated cost/schedule document will be used to develop plans and budgets for major projects. This same document will be used to track progress and actual expenditures, including Earned Value reporting. A sample project cost/schedule document with sample cost/progress reports must be included with the proposal as a supplementary document or the proposal will be considered non-compliant. Appropriate pre-deployment testing will be an expected part of each project that involves development of new drilling systems. Project plans for the coming year will be incorporated into the annual IDPO Program Plan that is submitted yearly to NSF for review and funding.

The successful awardee(s) must demonstrate the capability to provide NSF with sound long-range planning for ice-drill development and use. Specifically, the awardee must prepare, and annually update, a comprehensive five-year plan for ice-drill development, the Long Range Drilling Technology Plan, to support the U.S. research community. This plan will include drill allocation to specific projects to the degree that these commitments are known. To develop this document, the awardee will interact closely with the research community, NSF Program Managers, developers of ice-core instrumentation and downhole geophysical logging tools, as well as with relevant industry partners.

Primary Tasks

The sections below outline primary activities to be carried out by the Ice Drilling Program Office (IDPO) and the Ice Drilling Development Office (IDDO). These lists are not comprehensive but are provided to enable proposers to formulate their management concepts and organizational structure. The collaboration between the IDPO and IDDO must include development and execution of cross cutting activities such as implementation of a common website for both groups that describes current ice drilling capabilities, with examples of recent activities, as well as detailed conceptual descriptions of future drilling systems. It is also expected that the groups will work together to proactively develop plans for appropriate scientific workshops and conferences related to ice core drilling. The awardee is also expected to produce integrated reports of activities undertaken by IDPO and IDDO throughout the year so that the output of their activities is clearly documented for NSF in a fashion that is concise, useful, and easy for everyone to understand.

Ice Drilling Program Office (IDPO)

The Ice Drilling Program Office will play a proactive role in the community to encourage innovation in ice core drilling technologies in response to community needs. To that end, the following tasks will be essential to the operation of the office:

• Provide community leadership in ice core drilling research and development;