Geobulletin alpha

First Cores! Fossils, Fossils, Fossils (but very, very small!) 

I am beset with dish pan hands from the last two days of turning lumps of grey mud into geologic time.  How does that work?  Our mud has turned up pretty foraminifera as well as calcareous NANNOfossils (i.e. read

CORE DESCRIBERS : 3 teams, 3 specialities, 1 goal ! episode 2 Structural Geol. 

STRUCTURAL GEOLOGISTS Another team to describe the rocks. They are interested in the organization of the minerals into the rock. read

Exp359. JOIDES.Magnetic susceptibility: simply great !! 

Magnetic susceptibility: the name could seem weird ! The process used now in sedimentology  is smart. 2 points to know: - Magnetic susceptibility measures the answer of a sample in response to an applied magnetic field. A kind of degree of magnetization of the material. read

Exp359. JOIDES. Vous avez dit susceptibilité ?.... 

La susceptibilité magnétique. C'est juste génial !! Le nom peut paraitre barbare, le principe, utilisé en sédimentologie, est élégant ! 2 choses à savoir : read

The End is Just the Beginning 

We're coring our last hole of our last site of our last week of expedition 356. Everyone's a little tired and frazzled after two months at sea, away from their family and friends, with only the Pet Wall for company. And pretty soon we'll be putting in at Darwin, celebrating, and then going our separate ways. This might seem like an ending, but for the scientists, this is only the beginning of the expedition. These two months at sea [...]

A Blog on the Log of the Hole at the Bottom of the Sea 

We've been talking a lot in this blog about the cores we recover, but they're not the only source of data we use. We also get a lot of information out of the holes those cores leave behind. The holes have the same sediment layers as the cores, and unlike the cores themselves, which can be incomplete or mixed-up, the sediments in the ground can give us a very consistent record, hundreds of metres long. We measure the sediments on the [...]

Mechanical Mystery Tour 

The JR has pulled into site U1462, and while we wait for the first cores to come up, the scientists get a tour of the parts of the ships we normally don't get to see. For most of the expedition, we live and work near the bow (front) of the ship, in the laboratories, accommodation, mess hall, and rec areas. So let's explore the noisy world of heavy marine industry! read

Let's Get Physical Properties 

It takes an incredible amount of money and effort to retrieve a sediment core from below the sea. So we make sure we squeeze them for every last drop of scientific data, (sometimes literally) with an absolute GAUNTLET of tests.  read

Even Empty Cores Have Silver Linings 

We've finished drilling at site U1459A, and it was certainly a challenge. It didn't have the chunky fragments like U1458 (the first drill site), instead the sediment switches unpredictably between rock-hard carbonate layers, and soft sediment, making consistent coring incredibly difficult. But we're learning from our struggles! read

#typicalfieldworkday & Happy Birthday Briony! 

Goodygoody Girdwood Chronology Construction 

 Guest bloggers: Kaitlin Starr and Maddie Happ     During the summer of 2014, the Columbia Bay team (Dr.Wiles, Nick Wiesenberg, Kaitlin Starr and Jesse Wiles) cored numerous trees near the town of Girdwood, Alaska. The collection is primarily made up of cores taken from living Mountain Hemlock trees from the surrounding forrest. In addition

Russian Birch Climate Reconstruction 

Guest blogger – Dan Misinay During the summer of 2014 Dr. Wiles and I.S. student Sarah Fredrick traveled to Kamchatka, Russia. While there, they cored hundreds of birch (Bertula ermanii) and larch (Larix gmelinii) trees to bring back to the tree ring lab and be analyzed. The cores were mounted, sanded, counted, and measured. This

Days on the JR 

Mobile alarms, oh, it is already 23:20. ‘Wake up’, mind strikes and forces me to get up from the bed. After taking a shower, I prepare my backpack for the next 12-hour working shift. My roommate, who is working the opposite shift, is going to be here any time for the next twelve hours. After finishing all my morning ‘rituals’, I climb up the stairs full of enthusiasm to go to the core lab where we sedimentologists describe [...]

Splitting Core...and Peering Back in Time 

Once core has come into the labs, warmed up to room temperature (the bottom of the ocean is very cold!), and passed through a series of tracks that measure the physical properties of the whole core, it's time for the cores to be split in half.  The Bengal Fan scientists are eagerly waiting to get their hands on the core and see what's inside.  read

so dirty! 

I don't know what it is, but I cannot keep my clothes clean when I'm in the field. Everyone else on the field crew will leave the site looking like they've spent a day working hard, sure. But I leave the site looking like Pigpen. So why the mess? 1. As a geologist, I have to really get into the soil. I'm logging cores, or venturing close to the drilling operations to collect cuttings. So I

Extracting High Quality Mud from Cedar Creek Bog 

Tom Lowell and graduate student Stephanie Allard from Cincinnati and Jacklyn Rodriguez from the University of Illinois made the trip to Morrow County to core mud from a bog adjacent to the Cedar Creek Mastodon site. We will be working with the cores in Climate Change over the next several weeks and collaborating with this team. Extracting

The Chemistry of Cores 

Petrologists identify minerals using tiny slices of the rock called thin sections; geochemists identify the chemical characteristics of these rocks.  Together this information can build a more complete picture of the core.   read

Reconstructing History 

When you consider how much magmatic activity occurred in the Izu-Bonin-Mariana fore arc, the core from which we intend to gain so much historical geologic information may seem disproportionately small in comparison.  We collect cores no bigger than 60-62 mm (less than 2.5 inches) in diameter, which provide a very limited, but representative, view of the surrounding rock.  read

Coring at Petrified Forest National Park 

Paleontologist, Paul Olsen, explains why cores are so valuable in learning about Earth history. Related: What is Petrified

Bad News Blog. 

Just a quick note to keep everyone updated on activities onboard the JR. The last several cores have come up less than perfect, showing signs of problems with the bit or the material we're drilling into. Some of the last core contained lots of drilling mud, which looked like chocolate milk, not a good sign. read