Less than an hour after we lowered the thrusters on the ship to keep us in position at our third drilling site, a dozen or so humpback whales came curiously by.
Today we were supposed to be in full swing with our third site: SCO_13 in the Scotia Sea. The attempt to start drilling at 3186m depth yesterday failed. The “pig” a cleaning device got stuck, so the drill string and core barrel had to be pulled back up, checked, reasembeled then lowered to 3000m again. A time consuming process, meaning another shift for us scientist without much to do.
We are currently in a storm as well, winds at 50km/h speeds, snow and larger than 8m high waves… So regardless of a clogged drill we would still have had a break from drilling. On top of the rough weather conditions, a second worry is icebergs. There is a 20 meter long Iceberg right now just a hundred meters away, at some point it was heading directly towards the front of the ship us and we have had to move out of our position over the drill site. Icebergs are tracked mainly by radar and professional ice observer, Diego. On our way down to 60degree south the captain had to change our course several times to dodge them. The expedition (with name Iceberg Alley) are intentionally heading for the main path of icebergs calving of the Antarctic ice shelf, with subject to study the dynamics of the Antarctica ice sheet through time, so the threat of icebergs comes to no surprise to us.
Once drilling have successfully resumed we are aiming at drilling down to the basement at 900m below the sea floor. Which has an estimated age of 22 million years. The rest of the biostratigraphy team and I will be ready to investigate the cores on deck and figure out at which age the sediment recovered was deposited.
Once drilling have successfully resumed we are aiming at drilling down to the basement at 900m below the sea floor. Which has an estimated age of 22 million years. The rest of the biostratigraphy team and I will be ready to investigate the cores on deck and figure out at which age the sediment recovered was deposited.