I finally got some time to update the blog. We have now sampled our key station and the retrieved cores look really nice. The picture also shows the nice laminations in the sediment, indicating changes in the Black sea environments for the last thousand years. Enough interesting stuff is going on in these cores!
These cores only include the top 50 cm. The coring of the deeper sediment went less well as most cores were empty when they arrived on deck. Luckily we retrieved some cores with older sediment in the afternoon.
Yesterday, the coring went smoothly. The coring went better. After retrieval, the long cores with 4-5 m of sediment were cut in 1 meter sections by Eveline, Mattias, Iuliana, Gert-Jan and me. These sediment were described by Silviu and Ummuhan. That's a fulltime job as these 5 meters of sediment are described and photographed in detail.
Another core was prepared for several chemical analyses by Fatimah, Peter and Tom. This was done by the water temperature of the deep sea, namely 10 degrees, while the temperature outside was around 25 degrees. This results in nice contrast on board; the pictures below were taken at the same time.
We have another full program today, including coring and filtrations. Contact with the continents via the internet remains difficult but we will try our best to keep this blog updated. The next time I can hopefully include some pictures of dolphins. We were already lucky twice :).
Cheers,
Nikki
Cheers,
Nikki