Hi, The Joides Resolution is now in place over our first drilling site. We expect the first cores on deck very soon. The first 50m set of 5 cores is mainly to enable very detailed geochemistry and microbiology sampling. We in the chem. lab (Julius, Toshi, Maria, George, Yulia, Curly and I) will be kept extremely busy over the next few days. One set of measurement that I will be making very quickly are Salinity, pH and Alkalinity of porewaters (water squeezed from the sediments). These have to be made soon after core recovery because the chemistry changes quite rapidly once the core is cut. These measurements will tell us about chemical and microbial processes going on in these young, shallow sediments.

The picture is me by the alkalinity titrator.   More later. Simon