Daily Report 11 -- Wednesday, 22 December 2010 -- Drilling Into the Volcanic Basement of 26.5° Guyot
Location
Today we reached a milestone with the first-ever drilling of a Louisville seamount! It took more than seven years of preparation to get to this point, and everybody onboard the JOIDES Resolution is completely psyched by the idea it finally starts now. In these preceding years we have written and rewritten many versions of our IODP proposal, we have filed many reports to many IODP panels, we have carried out a six week site survery on the R/V Roger Revelle in 2006, and over the last year we have been extremely busy preparing for Expedition 330.
Now it all starts and after a successfull pressure test for a new non-magnetic sinker bar to be used lateron during the downhole logging, the drill string tagged seafloor at 1968.5 meters below rig floor and immediately after that Hole U1372A was spudded at 08:50 hr.
The first cores of Expedition 330 were recovered shortly afterwards containing soft sediment and a series of cemented volcaniclastic breccias with up to 100% recovery. This was a flying start and now also the wheels of the "core flow" started to move, meaning the recovered core was curated, split, described, measured and sampled. These wheels will not stop turning until February 12 when this expedition ends in Auckland. Hopefully by that time we have drilled ~420 m into the basement of four different seamounts each. That's a total of almost 1.5 km of seamount rocks! Evidently a lot of works still lays ahead of us!
Greetings Anthony Koppers
- 2083 reads