We’ve reached a milestone! We’ve got 400 m, that is 25% of the total core length of 1600 m, sampled. 1200 meters to go! At this pace, we should be able to finish within one month as planned. When we’re done, the remaining material will be placed back in the enormous hall at the Bremen Core Repository and stored for future users. This is an impressive facility. I wish we had a core storage like this at my home university!
Photo: CarolCotterill@ECORD_IODP
Opening the cores allows us to finally see in detail what kind of material we have collected. We’re particularly interested in finding evidence for changes in environmental conditions. For example, we know that the Baltic Sea used to be a lake and became connected to the oceans after the last ice age thousands of years ago. We can now study the differences in the lake and marine sediments in great detail.
Photo: MichaelKenzler@ECORD_IODP
Photo: CarolCotterill@ECORD_IODP
The Geochemical work that I am involved in is also moving forward. We now have two machines running day and night to analyse the composition of our pore water samples in detail.
Photo: LuzieSchnieders@ECORD_IODP
Photo: CarolineSlomp@ECORD_IODP
We're having short hall meetings at shift change to update each other on the results. Putting the results of the whole science team together in a report is going to be our next challenge!