It’s all happening here now! My shift started about an hour ago and everything is in full swing. We arrived at our first drill site on the 19th May and started coring that afternoon. Today we’ve recovered our 27th core, and reached a depth of around 250 metres below the seafloor! All the Scientific Party have their specific work stations to make sure that all the necessary sampling and work is done on the core once it has been brought into the laboratory. However, how exactly does it make it to the laboratory? Just to give you a brief idea of what happens… The core barrel and its contents are brought up through over 4000 metres of pipe that links the ship with the seafloor. Once on the rig floor the core liner and sediment therein is removed from the core barrel and placed on the core rack on the catwalk outside the laboratory. The core liner is rubbed down to remove excess water and the long length of core is cut into 1.5 m sections and the ends sealed. All core sections are brought into the lab to equilibrate to lab temperature – after that, the scientific analysis begins. ?

So everyone is very hard at work on the ship as ever, and the core keeps on coming!!!! Alberto, Kerry, Joe and myself (aka the Logging Team) are making sure we are ready to put our logging tools downhole as soon as the coring is finished. It’s thought that we should start taking our measurements in a couple of days. We’re all very excited!

On a non-work note… I was lucky enough to see a small White-tipped Shark yesterday at sunrise. It was just having a swim around the ship to see what it could see. Sadly it was too deep to take a decent picture to show you all. Sorry about that…