It's the Beginning of the End...of the Expedition

Greetings, everyone!

Hope you all (in America) are enjoying a nice Thanksgiving weekend. Out here in the Pacific Ocean, we're currently drilling what is most likely the second to last of the planned sites for the expedition. The seafloor at this site is about 3400 m (just over 2 miles) below the sea surface, so the cores are taking much longer to get brought up to the ship. It has been a nice respite from the rapid pace we had a couple weeks ago.

One of the good things about drilling in deeper water (beyond the slower pace of the cores) is that it is typically much easier to drill farther back in time. This is because the sedimentation rate at a given site generally correlates with the water depth of the site. Shallower sites tend to be closer to continents (which erode to provide a source of sediment) and have relatively high sedimentation rates. Deeper sites tend to be far away from continents and have very low sedimentation rates, as most of the sediment that erodes from the continents settles out of the water before reaching deeper water. So while the sediments 200 meters below the seafloor at some of the shallow sites we drilled earlier were less than half a million years old, they are much older (several million years old!) here.

While we don't get any days off during the expedition, we had a delicious Thanksgiving dinner a few days ago here complete with turkey, stuffing, and even some apple pie. The fruit and salad bars are slowly getting a little more barren (it has now been ~6 weeks since we left port and things are starting to go bad), but overall, the meals are still impressively good.

We had an aptly named "beginning of the end of the expedition" meeting earlier today. Our port call in Guam is now less than two weeks away. Looking forward to getting my land legs back!

Cheers,
Dan