Blogs

Everyone is very happy this morning, we pulled up some really nice long cylinders of rock from below the ocean floor. These will now be examined in the labs by the different teams of geologists. It has taken me awhile to understand the difference between an igneous petrologist and a paleomagnetist but I am slowly beginning to understand......

To anticipate the travel of a drifting buoy is not an easy thing !. We can look after the currents known in the area where the JOIDES is stationary :

In this part of the Pacific East, in the northern hemisphere, there are three main currents whose position and intensity vary with the seasons: 

During the Christmas and New Year Celebrations, the onboard baker carved water melons into a variety of fantastic shapes. Each one takes about three days to complete as he does it in his spare time. Here are a selection of my favorites....

Have you ever dug a hole in the sand at the seaside, and then tried to keep that hole from collapsing as you attempted to make the hole deeper? If the answer is yes, then you can appreciate the difficulties and doing exactly the same thing 5000m below the seabed. Yesterday we dropped a funnel shaped cone down the drill string and into the hole to try and stabilize the drill site.

For something that started out as a sarcastic joke...I'd say the actual event was pretty successful.

Bells and Horns rang out across the Pacific last night as the 123 people on board the JR celebrated the New Year. The highlight was the dropping of a ball from the Bridge Deck to the bow and the compulsory singing of Auld Lang Syne, not easy for native Japanese speakers!

Here are the results of the observation vs. interpretation game I had some of the scientists participate in. I pulled one person aside and asked them to describe (and write down) an object that I gave them. Then I gave this written description to someone else and had them guess what the object was.

I am working on a new illustration that will hopefully be posted very soon that attempts to explain the significance of the Hess Deep Rift. Over the last few weeks I have been meeting with the scientists on board so that they can give me the low down/crash course on geology, oceanography, petrology, sedimentology, etc. 

Operations continue aboard the JR.
These drilling operations require the JOIDES can maintain a fixed position, which may seem a difficult task against the winds and currents.

A great first!... measures wave speed with piezo from ‘seismology@school’ in the core lab of JR!

After measurements in the lab of the ship, we obtain the following results:
Wave velocity is not the same in the various materials found aboard the JR!