Lake E Daily News, April 6
The night shift recovered 10-11 short cores with recover ranging from 0-70% but most were in the range of 50%. We are drilling slowly to keep from getting stuck and at the same time dealing with units of coarse sand. Some of the cores contain muds that are similar to the upper part of the lake sequence. In any case the history of the crater will likely be exciting even if its not what we expected at this interval in the stratigraphy. We really appreciate and want to acknowledge the joint partnership we feel with the drillers; we are all pulling together out there on the platform, even if the going is difficult at times.
The day shift was occupied with stabilizing the hole and work on the mud mix. The sand made it difficult to get the liners out, for example, just to give you an idea of what the science crew was doing. The plan is to maintain stability and proceed slowly. Once we get to 200 m depth, we plan to have another session of down hole logging so we can capture as much information about this rather nasty section as we can, before we probe deeper in the sediment sequence.
Martin et al. in Pevek picked up the transfer pump today from Kinross Administration and it will come out on the next chopper. Replacement drillers Joseph Bolin and Jerry Jensen (DOSECC) and Chico Perales (CPS) are boarding the plane in Moscow bound for Pevek as I write.
Part of the convoy arrived today mule and fuel; we expect the remaining trucks with mud and casing to arrive tomorrow. In your spare time I strongly suggest you check out Tim Martin's blog and videos tomorrow (www.polartrec.com/geologic-climate-research-in-siberia). He already has two on web about the camp and drilling 101. He finished one today about the ride in the veshdahot (and all of the ways to spell it).
Cheers from the Lake...Julie BG
