A Sipre 3-inch core barrel was used. The cores were drilled by hand to avoid contamination by oil and gasoline. Both the ice core length and the ice thickness were recorded. There was often a discrepancy between these values due to gaps in the core or the inability to obtain a core sample from the bottom part of the ice floe.

Vertical thin sections were made from the structure cores. These thin sections were photographed using transmitted natural light and through crossed-polaroids to analyze the crystallographic structure of the ice. The relative amounts of granular and columnar ice were determined. Averaging all cores together there was 66% granular ice and 34% columnar in 2001. In 2002, there was 78% granular and 22% columnar ice. The structural analysis of the thin sections was performed by A.J. Gow.