Today was a day for catching up by most of the people who work in the core processing end of our operation, especially as it will not be long until we are moving again to our next drilling location even if that is not very far away. It seems that we have permission to drill through the moderate sediment cover and go directly to sampling the basement since we really don’t have a great deal of time on our hands to do a more comprehensive job at this time of the cruise and we deliberately target those rocks which are most important to our stated goals. Today downhole logging by geophysical tools was going on outside on the rig floor but inside we were thinking about how to sample the nice, long and generally fresh sequences of basalt which have been recovered from this last location. This was of course cue for another sampling party/feeding frenzy by interested parties. In the photograph I attach here you can see igneous petrologist Guo-Liang Zhang from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Qingdao admiring all the beautiful rocks in front of him that he has helped described and which he is now planning to take home for further analysis. First however there has to be some negotiation between the different igneous people about who is going to do what and with what rocks, all adjudicated by our efficient and fair curator Gemma Campbell.