Hello friends!  It’s Wiki the Kiwi again.  I had a lovely visit with all my Kiwi friends during our shore leave.  The ship had to stop for some fuel in Wellington.  I spent some time in town and now I am ready to get busy helping the scientists with their work. 

These things I am sitting on are called cores.  They are what the drill pulls up from the ocean floor.  Once the drill pulls them up, lots of things have to happen to them so the scientists can learn things from them.  I will be showing you what happens to the core. 

We should reach our first drilling site today, so tomorrow I should be able to show you some brand new cores.  The ones in the picture are cores they brought for the scientists to practice on.  See – even grown ups have to practice to get good at things!