More Core
The drilling is going quite well. This morning we passed the 70 meter below sea floor (mbsf) mark, with a 97% recovery rate.
Here is what some of the core looks like once it has been split in half. One half goes to the University of Florida Core Lab where it is archived for a minimum of 20 years. The other half is used for science here during the initial collection phase and during the coming years off-ice.
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| From Antarctica |
The diatomists make up just a small part of the ANDRILL science team. Other disciplines include, but are not limited to, curatorial, sedimentology and stratigraphy, paleontolgy (which includes diatoms), physical properties and logging, geochemistry and petrology, chronostratigraphy, modeling, and outreach. Everyone wants pieces of the core for their studies, and often the same piece if it is an interesting place. Here is how all the teams work together.
First, each morning we get a “Core Tour” where we are introduced to whatever was brought up last night. The scientist discuss and examine the regions of interest
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| From Antarctica |
And then flag them with their team flag
The core is also scanned at a high resolution and digitized, and many studies can then be performed without the physical core. These screenshots are of Corelyzer and PSICAT, two excellent software tools for imaging, describing, and recording core data.
