Six-Day Log

Storegga Slide Coring Cruise

Written by Michele Hatton
Educator & Florida State undergraduate geology student

Monday, September 6 – At Sea

The waves continue to batter our ship, but the skies are bright (go figure). We collected a gravity core from one site, then steamed to another for GGC-27 and JPC-28. JPC-28 put the exuberance back into our top geologists. Instead of staying in place, sediment plopped out all over the deck when we cut it. Much to my amazement, the glob was then photographed, logged, and sampled. They were expecting soft sediment here and they got it!

We needed the lift in morale. Yesterday, a gloom had descended on our team. The day prior, we had hauled up two bent cores, a dangerous job. They arrived in the shape of an arc, bent from hitting authigenic carbonate or possibly glacial dropstones buried in the sediment. Then, yesterday, we sank a three-barrel JPC that wouldn’t come back up. I was typing away to my students at the time, when I noticed an uncomfortable hush in the lab. All eyes were glued to the monitors. The captain was summoned to make the call, and after a brief discussion, he ordered the crane operator to keep on pulling. The cable snapped. We lost the entire rig. It was our last JPC rig on board.