We had our first live broadcast for Expedition 324, Shatsky Rise from the JR to the National Museum of Natural History in Tokyo, Japan. Yuko Uchio, shown in the picture led the effort from the bridge deck of the JR. This was a very successful broadcast, soon we will do a live broadcast to the University of the Virgin Islands Science 100 class.

Currently we are approaching Shatsky Rise, and in a few hours we will occupy our position over the designated drilling site. We will sit over about 4 km of ocean to the ocean floor. We will lower the drill string (I don’t know what that is, but its all I’ve been hearing about, I will let you know as soon as I find out) to the ocean floor surface and then drill into the sediment and into the basement, where we will drill into about 100-300 m. We will spend about 4.8 days on each site to drill, pull up the sample rocks, etc… We hope the operation runs smoothly. All are professionals, so everything will run smoothly, but if something goes wrong, there are very competent people on board to solve the problems. We have 5 sites to visit, and we are maybe a little over half a day behind schedule, if you remember from Will’s blog, the problem we had with satellite communications set us back about a day, but good weather helped us along on our journey from Yokohama to Shatsky Rise. As we move into action, we will update the blogs as we move along!

Bye for now, nasseer