I have always wanted my own pacific island. I just never figured that I would get it. We are still on station due to the lack of berthing space in Victoria, BC.  We are due in on the morning of July 5 but we were hoping that we might get an extra night in port. We are still working and having fun onboard and will continue to do so.

Yesterday we got to go out to the helideck. It was really great. The picture that I included is from the deck. It was loud and windy, and smelly and wonderful.

Today we worked on carbonate sediment core samples. We sampled the core the day before yesterday and it has been in the oven to dry out all of the moisture still in the sample. Today we crushed the samples into a very fine powder so that we would be able to test them. We used two different tests to determine its percentage of carbonate. Carbonate is a chemical that makes up a type of sedimentary rock called limestone. By determining the percentage of carbonate in the sample we can compare that to other proxy data taken from that core to determine what the climate was like in the past. It is important that we learn as much as we can about our past climate so that we can try to predict what our current climate is going to do. Tomorrow we plan to analysis the data that we collected today. We also tested out a method to determine the same data in a much simpler way that we can all use in our classrooms.

Later