We have now cored down to the level of about 460 m below the seafloor and are preparing to run geophysical logs into the hole so that we can assess the upper portion of the sediments before we make our final push to drill very deeply right until the igneous basement here in Laxmi Basin.

It doesn’t feel like we’re going very quickly but we are making steady progress.  We don’t really know what lies below us and the only decent clues come from the earlier marine geophysics that our co-chief Dhananjai Pandey collected with his colleagues as part of the application process.  In this picture you can see him explaining what he has interpreted from these reflection seismic images concerning the nature of the sediment we are about to encounter, with a little bit of help from our staff scientist Denise Kulhanek. In the meantime we are crossing our fingers and hoping for good luck that the hole can remain stable and that a continuous section of geophysical logs can be collected.  Unfortunately in sandy deposits such as we have encountered there is often the possibility of a collapse which may prevent us collecting the data that we desire. We shall see.