Embedded Files
Official Expedition Link: https://www.jamstec.go.jp/chikyu/e/exp405/
Tokyo & Hakone (Fri, Aug 30th - Wed, Sept 4th)
Tokyo & Hakone (Fri, Aug 30th - Wed, Sept 4th)
Hi all! I'm sorry I haven't been great at blogging in real-time. I watched 3 movies and some TV on my 12 hr nonstop flight to Toyko. Don't judge me! I couldn't figure out if I should have slept or not so once I got to the hotel I was very sleepy and slept from 6:30 PM to 6:30 AM.
Some random musings:
I love that Japan has great public transit, you can even add a transit card on your phone's Apple wallet! It works even if your phone is dead (don't ask me how I know that..).
I forgot that Japan drives and walks (?) on the 'wrong' side of the road.
The typhoon earlier in the week that hit southern Japan still had ramifications. It was rainy/cloudy/ muggy most of my tourist days. Some trains were still closed due to landslides and flooding.
On Saturday, I ventured out to Senso-ji temple. For 100 yen, you can get a fortune from stands around the temple. I got a good fortune:
"Bad fortune in the past will change to be good, just like the crescent grows to be full, your luck will grow to be good to the full. From the palace in the clouds, wealth and treasure will come to you. Make haste in doing whatever you want. The sooner the better. *Your wish will be realized. You should be righteous. *The sick person will get well. *The lost article will be found. *The person you are waiting for will come soon. *Building a new house and removal are both good. *It is good to make a trip. "
I wandered around Asakusa, window shopped, and saw the Skytree. After than I got some ramen and went the the Toyko National Museum. There were so many beautiful artifacts and paintings displaying Japan's rich history and culture. The science museum was right next door so how could I not? Most of the exhibits were in Japanese, but tucked away in the top floor, was the geology exhibit! It even had a display of the drilling vessel I'm currently on, pretty cool to see. Before dinner, I went to the Shibuya Crossing then went to a very upbeat yakatori restaurant (one of these posts is going to be dedicated to the yummy food I've had (but fyi my phone does not eat first ha!).
On Sunday morning, I went to the Hamarikyu Gardens, a zen oasis in the middle of a bustling city. I had a nice matcha tea and sweet thingy in park before heading to take a water bus to the Toyko SKYTREE (like the Seattle Needle, etc). No Fuji views but I was amazed about how densely populated the city is. Perspective is everything.
That evening, I went to an art exhibit titled teamLab: Borderless. It was very trippy and beautiful. A highlight of my trip so far. The motto for the museum: "Wander, Explore, and Discover" Since it was borderless (i.e. no map), I definitely missed some rooms, and the geologist in me was concerned by not having a map..ha! Sometimes it's good to be lost though and I loved it. They had a really cool immersive/interactive tea room too.
On Monday morning, I took a train and bus up a winding road to Hakone. I relaxed a bit here with some of the hotel's amenities including an onsen with Mt Fuji views (too cloudly to see while I was there).
I hiked Mt. Kintoki with Mt. Fuji views (couldn't see Mt. Fuji... too cloudly.. are you seeing a trend here? - see pic below). It was a lot of elevation gain but I was glad to get moving before getting on the ship. Then I got a pirate ship on Lake Ashi to see the famous Hakone Shrine. My tip would be to take the other modern ship from a different port - it gets you way closer to the shrine than the pirate ship. I took the ropeway (gondola) back to the hotel. The next morning, I headed down to Shimzu, where the Chikyu was berthed.
I'll do a science post in few days about why/what we are doing offshore Japan.
⬅️ All I can see is kikuchi bands 😂 (for EBSD microstructure pals).
Chikyu send-off & transit (Sept 5th- 7th)
Chikyu send-off & transit (Sept 5th- 7th)
On Sept 4th, we had a pre-cruise science party in Shimizu restaurant on the 4th. It was great to meet everyone in real life rather than 2D Zoom video calls. Half of the people stayed out and went to a bar but I was too tired. I knew I wouldn't be 100% for our long day the next day.
On the 5th, we boarded the ship. Although, we didn't set sail til the next day. We tried on our PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) including gloves, coveralls, helmets, and steel-toe shoes. Then, we got our bunk assignments. My bunkmate is awesome but she's going to be the person I see the least! We will cover 24-hour operations once we arrive at our drill site, which means that we will work 12-hour shifts. To maintain some alone time and privacy, we are on the opposite shift as our bunkmates so that we can each have room to ourselves to sleep. I will be on the night shift which means I work from midnight to noon! Yikes! I'm sure I'll get used to it. I'm going to see more sunrises on the ship than I have ever before! I'm a night owl.
But the internet doesn't work in the living quarters so our rooms are really just for sleeping. I guess it makes sense, the ship is basically a giant Faraday cage! The rest of the day and into the 6th consisted of shipboard health and safety meetings and lab tours.
The ship we are on is called Chikyu and is specifically designed for scientific ocean drilling. The translated to English, Chikyu means Earth. Very fitting. The ship is absolutely massive and incredibly impressive. I believe her 20th birthday is coming up soon! I'll do a ship tour blog soon too.
The institution in charge of the Chikyu gave us a lovely goodbye from port at 10 AM on the 6th. It already felt like a huge honor to be on the ship but the send-off made it even more special. They had very well-organized groups of people holding signs in English and Japanese. There were also two Chiyku models mounted on hats - so fun! And we finally got our epic view of Mt Fuji!!
The rest of the day we talked science. Mainly, we discussed about how sampling rocks from the cores is going to work since many people are interested in small zones of material. Sharing is caring! We did get a chance to go up on the helideck for our first sunset with no land in sight.
Food blog
Food blog
Snacks I packed:
Gummy bears (these didn't even make it on the ship...oops)
Plain goldfish
So many granola bars
Milk duds
Halloween candy
Variety of teas
Popcorn
Trail Mix
Pringles (cc. Dr. Kat Wilson)
The food on the Chikyu is so good. There's always fresh salad, french fries, sashimi, breads, coffee, juices. The entrees have been things like soba, ramen, curries, Japanese pancakes, stir fry. The pictures are all half-eaten because I have no patience when there's food in front of me and there are many more options that I haven't tried yet from the buffet. And there's cake and ice cream for dessert. I'm a happy camper but you might have to roll me off this boat! There's also a midnight lunch since we will be an around-the-clock operation.
While I was in Toyko and Hakone, I tried my best to eat good food. I didn't try the famous sulphur eggs in Hakone -sorry Hershorns! The dinner spots I loved in Toyko:
Teppen Onnadojo Bustling yakitori (chicken skewers) in a festive, easygoing atmosphere. All the grills were right in front of me and the chefs were doing some sort of callbacks with each other. My waiter did not speak much English and I don't speak any Japanese ( I wish!) but we had a nice conversation about why I was staying in Japan for 2 months.
Chao Chao Gyoza Yurakucho Small restaurant that serves gyoza. This has been my favorite meal *so far*.
Oh ya and randomly I had a corndog on top of the SKYTREE.
Chikyu Tour
Chikyu Tour
⬆️ Chikyu specs from https://www.jamstec.go.jp/chikyu/e/about/spec.html#chikyu
20 tons of gas/ per day - that's a minimum since we aren't drilling yet.
⬅️ Our official IODP Expedition JTRACK logo.
We got to tour around the whole ship today which included going up the derrick (the tallest point on the ship). It is kind of the highest point in the ocean since it's the tallest derrick of any drilling vessel.
Here are our accommodations for the next 2 months. Aside from not having to cook, there's also a laundry service where you hang your dirty clothes bag on your front door and it is returned washed, dried, and folded within 4 hours. That's gonna be an adjustment when I'm back on land...
The photo (bottom right) which has a pool that looks like something you want to jump in on hot summer day is actually a hole in the ship where the drill pipes will be assembled and stacked to lower into the sea. Right now we are setting up to find a tiny borehole that was drilled in 2012 on the seafloor - an open hole that we want to put temperature sensors down into. There's 7 km (~4.3 miles) of water before we can even start searching for this hole with an underwater camera. That's deep! This is such a feat of engineering that I still can't totally wrap my mind around it. Then the plan is to continue 1 km down into the sediments. You can think of this like trying to put a long, cooked piece of spaghetti into a straw on the ground while standing on a chair with an industrial fan blowing. Hurray I think I'm caught up to blog in real time!
Chikyu tour part 2
Chikyu tour part 2
There's a really big gym onboard. It's helpful to move your body to stay sane. So I've been going in the afternoons and getting my vitamin d in by doing laps on the heli deck at lunch and for sunset. 1 mile is ~23 times around the heli deck. Gotta got clockwise and counterclockwise to stay balanced. There's also a sauna, I haven't been yet, but maybe I will today since it's a women's only day (we have Wed and Sun). The next picture is one of our lab workspaces. This was snapped during a demonstration from Patrick Fulton, one of the co-chiefs, on the temperature observatory we are currently installing. There are a bunch of tables and different labs for all the different analyses, descriptions, and sampling we will be doing once our core is onboard. We have been spending most of our time in the lounge and office cubicles lately. This is because we were in transit and then have been installing the temperature observatory, which doesn't require around-the-clock support. We've had some mini-workshops about what we learned from past cruises and diving into some of the questions we are hoping to answer now. Some of our scientists who will be sailing after all of us here onboard depart have also been able to join us. You can also see all the scientists gathering around the TV in the lounge watching the live underwater camera when we found the old borehole after searching the seafloor for a day. Once we found it, it was a matter of connecting our drill string to it which kind of reminded me of the claw arcade game. Some of us were playing ping pong while we waited and it got seriously competitive!
Something I can't quite wrap my head around is that the current is slightly bending the drill string so the end of the drill pipe close to the seafloor is not necessarily directly under the ship! The drill pipe is steel (I think) but still, under the immense pressures of 7km of water and the shear from the currents there's some curvature. (The same goes for once we actually start drilling in the sediments by the way - no straight lines in the real world). There's something called a transponder that we deployed earlier that maps the bathymetry (seafloor topography) so that we could have a better idea of where we are 7 km below the seafloor. Also, anytime I say "we", it's the royal we as in I have nothing to do with the day-to-day engineering operations.
I also forgot to mention that the mess hall is buffet-style which you can see the photo below - it's so dangerous (in a good way!). My buffet sampling strategy is not as organized as my rock sampling...ha! We live and breathe through this notice board which describes what meetings, operations, and safety items are taking place each day. Just for a fun, you can see the height of Mt. Fuji compared to the amount of seawater we have to get through in order to just start drilling. A feat of engineering!
What the heck are we doing out here?
What the heck are we doing out here?
Figure from Exp. 405 Science Prospectus - *subject to change*
From the official Expedition website: "IODP Exp. 405 JTRACK will drill into the Japan Trench subduction zone to find out what controls shallow slip during great earthquakes. Exp. 405 will visit two sites; one in a transect across the trench from undisturbed sedimentary rocks on the incoming Pacific Plate; the second, in a site that will access the fault zone in the region of large, shallow slip observed during the 2011 Tohoku-oki earthquake."
We successfully completed our first task of the expedition! We will now POOH and lie down then move and MU and start BHA to start LWD...😂 the acronyms are seriously intense. Here are some of our most used so far:
(some) Acronyms: https://www.iodp.org/resources/acronyms
APL = Ancillary Project Letter
RCB = Rotary Core Barrel
POOH = Pull Out Of Hole
WOW = Wait On Weather
BHA = Borehole Assembly
HPSC = High Pressure Core Spray
LWD= Logging While Drilling
MU = Make-up
We are starting 24 hr operations and I'm struggling to shift to my 2400-1200 schedule. Anyone who knows me knows that my sleep is precious and I'm quite good at it. Any night-shifters have any tips?
Since the old borehole from 2012 (that now has temp sensors in it..yay!) already has a name C0019, and we are staying close by we will use the same name with a letter at the end to describe our different holes. This is because you can use the same name if you are within a 100 m diameter circle. We will be drilling 3 different holes for C0019. And moving ~10 km east and drilling 3 holes there. This will be called C0026 and will hopefully recover an undeformed "baseline" of the types of sediments that are in the subduction zone. Logging while drilling (LWD) means that a whole bunch of sensors are on the drill pipe just behind the drill bit so as the drill bit goes down and material is removed the sensors are collecting data. We will get some data in real-time and the high-resolution data will be downloaded once the sensors are back onboard. Well-logging is when the sensors send signals, they pass through the rocks, and then they measure the electrical, radioactive, and acoustic (sound) properties of the rocks. These data will be our first "look" at the properties of the rocks. We do this first because this information is not only helpful for us scientists, but also for the drillers, so we can both have a better understanding of what we will encounter when we core the same rocks.
I am most excited for the RCB part of the expedition when we actually recover core (the real rocks that we can touch and measure). 'Core' is a long tube of sediment or rock captured by the drill bit as it moves deeper beneath the seafloor. The younger sediment is at the top closest to the seafloor, as these were laid down more recently. Except...when the area is highly deformed like at the Japan Trench! In that case, sometimes older sediments get stacked on top of young sediments by thrust faults due to compression (aka when 2 plates collide) and one plate (Pacific Ocean) slides/dives underneath a more buoyant plate (Japan).
The piston cores (HPSC) only go tens of meters into the sediments. These types of cores are useful for the preservation of poorly lithified (watery, goopy) sediments near the surface. The RCB type of core mixes up the first couple of tens of meters so that's not great. Especially because the youngest, shallowest sediments close to the seafloor are interesting to sedimentologists who are interested in paleoseismology (looking at the past earthquake record through the sediments it mobilizes).
I'm realizing my blog posts are catered toward two audiences here- my geology friends and non-geology friends. Both groups feel free to ask questions if I'm not clear and/or you want more information!
Tea Ceremony + (Sept 16-Sept 18 ish)
Tea Ceremony + (Sept 16-Sept 18 ish)
Some less-than-ideal things have happened in the last 24 hrs, including a whole ship toilet issue. Don't worry, these things are par for the course in deep-sea scientific drilling. And the toilets were fixed insanely quickly - like 20 min. The night shift scientists took credit for this fix because we had good jiu-jiu from our tea ceremony. It's a ceremonial preparation and presentation of matcha in a designated room with snacks, flowers (of the season), and a scroll. Japanese tea masters require years of training. One of the sedimentologists onboard was our tea master so we were able to do it! Every move is deliberate, with some larger symbolism behind it. This kind of intentional action is really relaxing and something I'd like to implement more of in my life. Slow down to speed up. Plus matcha wakes you up and is delicious.
I was staring at this book above my desk and finally pulled it down. I opened the inside cover to see this sweet inscription from Casey Moore. This was awesome on many levels. One, he is a giant in the subduction zone science field. Two, he was a genuinely kind soul (I never got the chance to meet him but only heard amazing things). I'm kinda in his academic family tree. Actually, a large part of the science party on board is. So my Master's advisor (s/o Christie Rowe!!) was his PhD student...so like an academic grandpa. He sailed on the previous IODP Expedition in 2012 to this region, too.
During the crossover between the two shifts, the structure team became the surgical team - Alysa's laptop fan was making an absolutely horrendous squeaking noise (I'll spare you) so we tried to clean it but we made it worse :) She's hopefully going to get one shipped to the helicopter airport and then they will bring it with them on the next heli run.
After a few just ok sunrises, we've had 2 stellar ones. Today's sun rose through derrick. There was absolutely no wind this morning - the doldrums this far north? To be honest, it was freakier than the heavy wind we had a few mornings ago. In the photo of the port side of the ship you can see a tanker on the horizon. I wonder what it has onboard and where it's going...
Well-loggers are awesome because they turn these squiggly lines into logical interpretations of the different types of sediments, structures, and properties of the rocks that are 7 km + below us. The bumpy lines are plotted by depth on the y-axis, and you can see all of the lines start to get bumpy/wiggly-er toward the bottom that's where they found the PBFZ and then a different lithology (chert, which is microscopic quartz essentially). Chert is really hard and resistive, so it shows up nicely in the logs. Our logs might look like this since we aren't too far away from the JFAST site, but maybe we will find something different?? That's the beauty of geoscience. We have no control over our experiments. We live in the natural laboratory.
Speaking of beauty, the sunrise today was absolutely spectacular. The day-shifters who stayed up for data also got a special morning treat. One of the grad students onboard, Takeru Yoshimoto, serenaded on his guitar. It was a pretty special moment onboard. Good data, super sunrise, nice music, great people. Sometimes, sunrises, geology, and planetary science make me feel small and insignificant. There are so many sunrises, there's so much of Earth's history, we are cosmic dust in the universe. But that's also kind of beautiful. How cool is it that we are all here on this planet together at the same time? What are the odds? I'm feeling grateful that I have these moments to reflect. I'm in the middle of middle of the Pacific Ocean with smart people (that I'm already learning so much from) doing what we love to do. And I can have ice cream cones after every meal. No social constructs onboard.
Food facts: I learned that they loaded 50 tons of food when we boarded. That's so much!! We just had our first supply boat (that we saw) run - offloaded waste and got some fresh fruits and veggies. Apparently, we are eating 20% more than other expeditions. LOL. Trust me, when I say the food is really good. Also, movie butter popcorn makes people happy in the wee hours of the morning.
Marianne's B-day & Day-Night shift logging (Sept 18-20)
Marianne's B-day & Day-Night shift logging (Sept 18-20)
It's been a lovely couple of days (nights?) onboard. It was one of our fearless co-chiefs, Marianne Conin, birthday. We had a small birthday party with the science party. Thanks to the wonderful catering staff and the amazing lab technician's decorating skills, we got to celebrate after our daily operations meeting. <-I'm a little sleepy I can't be bothered to make that sentence readable.
We had cookies and a fruit platter that had these toothpick flags with all of our faces on 'em. They even printed some people's favorite cartoon characters on the back of their flags. There was even the geology equivalent of a pin the tail on the donkey - sample Marianne from the core aka pics of Marianne on the seismic line across the Japan trench - the smiling pictures are on the parts of subsurface with lots of deformation!
The next day (midnight), our drill bit had been churning along and was scheduled to reach the plate boundary fault zone (PBFZ) at ~3:30 AM. Some of the day-shifters stayed way past the end of their shift to see the PBFZ show up in the real-time data. You can see Kaitlin Schaible (hook 'em horns) being a well-logging troll in the wee hours of the morning hehe. Sorry, data on TV is redacted - you'll have to read our papers coming out in the coming years for those scientific goodies. :)
BUT, have no fear, I put the logs from the 2012 Expedition (JFAST) below so you can see the type of data we are currently looking through. You can read all about the science from the expedition ~12 years ago here (figure is from here): http://publications.iodp.org/proceedings/343_343T/
Get to the choppa, world records, drill bits, +shopping (Sept 22 -26)
Get to the choppa, world records, drill bits, +shopping (Sept 22 -26)
New scientific ocean drill pipe length record: 7906.1 meters!!
This week (ish) has flown by! Our C0019 LWD hole broke a world record! And produced stunning data - the logging team has been hard at work on the memory data interpreting structure and units. The top photo is of the chewed-up drill bit that has large chunks taken out of it. We drilled through some hard lithologies like chert which is why the bit looks like that. The LWD informs us of our next mission - coring the real rocks. We know the properties of the rocks which will make it easier for the drillers to know what's coming so they can tailor their parameters (rate of penetration, mud/fluid volume, etc). And if things are going slower, we know which intervals are the most interesting so if we need to skip intervals, we can. One wild fact about the real-time data is that it's sent up 7 km of drill pipe as 1's and 0's in the form of a mud pulses that computers decode! Literal mud creates well logs squiggles and images!! INSANELY COOL!
That stellar sunrise from my last post followed the old adage "Red sky at night, sailors delight, red sky in the morning sailors take warning." We had some bad weather (typhoon remnants), but the timing worked out because we were already POOH-ing the BHA. But then it got me thinking is there any science behind that adage? It's referenced in Venus and Adonis by Shakespeare and the Bible (Matthew XVI: 2-3). Here's the science behind the red skies: In the mid-latitudes, the prevailing winds are westerlies so storms move in from the West. During sunrise and sunset, the sun is low in the sky and transmits light through the thickest part of the atmosphere. A red sky suggests an atmosphere loaded with dust and moisture particles. We see pretty red because red wavelengths (the longest in the color spectrum) are breaking through the atmosphere. When we see a red sky at sunset (in the west), the setting sun sends its light through a high concentration of dust particles. This usually indicates high pressure and incoming stable air from the west aka good weather. A red sunrise (in the east) can mean a high-pressure system (good weather) has already passed, thus indicating that a storm system (low pressure) may be moving to the east.
Since we had bad weather we weren't allowed on the helideck for safety reasons. I decided to put on a seasickness patch but wow scopolamine had some side effects for me -dry throat and blurry vision. Cost-benefit analysis->patch comes off. My seasickness hasn't been that bad anyway, even though the swell is like 8 meters!
We moved! A few km's east to the incoming plate side and started LWD for the sediments that are going into the subduction zone. These sediments are going to be sliding (?) into the subduction zone in a couple of hundreds of thousands of years given how far from the trench (start on subduction zone) we are and the long-term plate rate (~8 cm/yr).
On Sundays, after our ship safety drill, there is a ship shop that is open for 30 minutes a week. The Chikyu is a dry ship, but the store does have non-alc beer, coke, Japanese pringles, toiletries, and chocolate. The science party figured this out and as you can see by the line, we love it.
Helicopters come ~1/day and ship staff are exchanged. I think they work 1 month on, 1 month off. They also bring some supplies. The science party requested some critical infrastructure -new ping-pong paddles ...ha! The supply boat brings fresh food and the larger items every so often too. It was a little spooky to see the helicopter land and take off yesterday: the landing on the helideck that moving up and down by 8 meters is impressive!
Today, we got to look at the scratched LWD tools from the last hole but I was more excited to see the moon pool - there you can really see how big the waves are! The two pictures don't do it justice. It was so trippy because the LWD tools are going down into the water but the heave of the ship is 5+ meters but there's a heave compensator at the top of the derrick. It's like an optical illusion. The last photo is the RCB (core drilling tool) all setup and ready to go, we will start having core onboard hopefully in the first week in October so apologies if I'm a little less consistent with the blog but that just means I'm happily looking at deformed rocks.
Food blog 2
Food blog 2
As long as you promise not to judge how much I'm eating, I'll show ya how good the mess hall is. Since I'm on the night shift, my meals are from 23:00 -1:00, 5:00-7:00, and 11:00-13:00. I skip the 17:00-19:00 meal, but apparently, the dayshifters have gotten pizza for that meal twice! That's ok I've been eating well, here's a list off the top of my head: bao, dumplings, calamari, natto, tan tan ramen, soba, takoyaki (fried octopus balls), sashimi, inari sushi, curry, fried rice, mochi, banana bread, variety of fruits. Also, coveted chocolate cake and apple pie (have not seen yet).
Available always: soup and salad every meal, rice, coffee, apple juice, green tea, ice cream
1st YouTube video by Science Media out now!
1st YouTube video by Science Media out now!
These guys from the Netherlands are well-versed in documenting ocean drilling research and we are lucky to have them onboard with us. This will be one of many videos describing what's going onboard. It's the first of many so please stay tuned and I'll try to post 'em as I'm notified. There are actually a handful of outreach officers onboard that stay for 2-3 weeks at a time. Bea, a historian from Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology started onboard with us. Now we have the videographers from Science Media, communications officer Lisa Smith from Curtin, and photographer Doriane Letexier.
Lisa also made this super rad day in a life video:
In other news, after some delays including escaping a typhoon, we are getting core on deck today (ish)! Wooohooo!
Lab techs splitting core.
1st sampling party? And co-chief Christina Regalla is onboard!
Physical properties lab area.
Paleomagnetism lab.
Core on deck!
Core on deck!
We got our first core a week-ish ago so we've been pretty busy. Check out the video below that describes how we get the core from 7 km water depth to the ship. It's from the Joides Resolution, the decommissioned (😢 ) US scientific drilling vessel, but it's pretty much the same process on Chikyu. Once the core is on board, the geochemistry team on shift takes some time-sensitive samples and measurements and immediately heads to the lab to start working on them. It takes 5.5 hrs between cores. The core barrel travels 14 km + to the sediments and back but every time there's a core on deck they announce it on the loudspeakers because a bunch of people have to jump into action at that time.
The co-chief and structural geology "watchdog" (aka the structure team lead) that's on shift decides where to split the core into sections making sure to not cut through interesting features. Each core is about 9.5 m long and is spilt into 1.5 m (max) sections.
From there, the cores get CT'ed like the same CT you'd see in a doctor's office. The software used to investigate the cores calls all the sediments/rocks our patients 😂. And it's labeled anterior and posterior so we have this handy plastic reference core to keep us firmly grounded in the rock world (Photo by the blogger extraordinaire Callan Bentley). Some scientists need whole hockey pucks from the core, so again, the structural geology watchdog says which intervals are ok to sample. From there, the core gets split into two halves, one called the working half and the other is the archive half. The archive half is described and observed by the sedimentologists, but no samples are taken and it's preserved for future scientists to observe at the Kochi Core Center.
The working half of the core is where the structural geology team measures the orientation of the sedimentary bedding, which changes due to depositional changes, faulting, folding, and slumping. We can also measure the orientation of the faults and folds, which tells about the stress field that created them.
Once we've done that, the shipboard samples are taken. Shipboard samples are taken and analyzed onboard to answer the questions outlined in our science party prospectus. The samples are for physical properties (like moisture and density) and paleomagnetism. There is only one micropaleontologist so he is on and 6:00 -18:00 shift, he is observing diatoms (microalgae) in a microscope and the presence/absence of the different types tells us how old the sediments are. And if there are any age reversals, we can say there's likely a fault! The final samples are for paleomagnetic studies, which can also tell us about the age. Did you know that Earth's magnetic field flips a lot? 183 times in the last 83 million years. Paleomagnetic fabric shows us the geometric configuration of the magnetic minerals of the rock.
During our crossover time, when day shift and night shift are both awake, we flag and sample where the cores for our post-cruise research that will be shipped to us at the end of the expedition.
What do y'all wanna know more about? Need anything clarified? Happy to entertain questions!!
Grad students, René Castillo (THE Ohio State) and Cameron Brown (UCLA) work on the squeeze cake for geochemistry.
Microbio lab.
Example of a cut we make for structural measurements or to sample the rocks for our future experiments or observations. Flags on toothpicks in the background indicate that someone wants to take their personal sample there.
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