GPS in place and first core on deck

19. July, 2014

With the new functional GPS module in place, yesterday afternoon, we set sail to our first destination – Kolbeinsey ridge, North of Island – two days from here. The transit time is often a painful experience, testing your patience to the absolute maximum. However, during this transit the time has not been used entirely in vein. Last night we stopped a couple of hours at the Storegga slide to retrieve a sediment core for some of our colleagues back in Bergen. The operation gave us a perfect opportunity to test the equipment used for sediment coring, including the temperature loggers that we will deploy in order to measure heat flux in the sediments. As a rule of thumb, the temperature increase with one degree Celsius per 10 meter you go down into the sediments and this was exactly what we observed in this core. However, in other places the heat flux can be significantly higher, especially along the spreading ridges, and this year we are excited (at least I) that we will be able to measure it. The work with the core finished just before the sun, after a short dip beneath the horizon, once again felt the urge to rise.

Otherwise there is not much to report; some people are in the final stages of preparing their labs making sure that everything will run smoothly (is that possible) once the samples are on deck.

Others are engaged in killing time digesting the long list of videos that are onboard the ship.

Written by: Steffen Leth Jørgensen