We’re sampling in the Ångermanälven River estuary (Bothnian Sea) and are surrounded by forested land.
We came here with help from a pilot. Some parts of the estuary are very narrow and we’ll need his help to get out again.
It’s quite a change - the lights that we see at night are nearby and are houses and cars not ships. It’s also colder here at night and there are strange smells from a factory nearby. The good news is that we have had a delivery of fresh vegetables, fruit and other food!
We’re here to drill sediments with “varves”. These are annual deposits of clay that are visible as alternating dark and light layers in the sediment. We hope to get a record of varve formation and changes in deposition of sediment material for at least the past 10.000 years.
Drilling is quick here! The holes so far have a maximum depth of only 37 meters. We’re also taking a few short cores (so-called Rumohr cores, less than 1 m long) to capture the sediment surface.
We’ve already completed all coring at our third site and expect to complete the fourth site tonight. We will then leave the estuary and move to our fifth location in the Landsort deep, tomorrow. We hope to reach that in roughly 36 hours. We’re looking forward to those sulfide-rich smelly muds from the deepest part of the Baltic Sea!