Core Drill | BFOE Glossary

Go Deeper For parents & teachers

Within the BFOE franchise, a portable coring drill for extracting rock samples. Real-world coring ranges from centimetre-scale hand samplers up to kilometre-scale industrial rigs. Each core preserves stratigraphy and mineralogy, and in the case of ice cores, a time-series record of past atmospheric composition. Ocean-floor and ice-core drilling programmes have produced some of the most important evidence we have for past climate change.

In the Free Sample Pack The Burning Mountain — Earth Science Sample Pack

The Earth Science sample pack expands on the climate-evidence story Cracker hints at in Chapter 1. It contains photographs from real ice-core drilling stations, a CO₂ timeline drawn from 800,000 years of Antarctic ice records, and a short classroom worksheet linking core sampling to the evidence we have for past climate change.

Photographs from the British Antarctic Survey at Halley Research Station
Atmospheric CO₂ timeline chart drawn from real ice-core data spanning 800,000 years
Classroom worksheet — “What a core can tell us” (UK KS2, Years 5–6)

See the free Sample Pack

Appears In

The Burning Mountain Chapter 1 — When the Mountain Roared

"… vent gauge, a thermal wand, a folded danger map, and a portable core drill that he had already caught three cubs trying to switch on when …"