The Cape
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By Thomas Ronge |
The infamous Patagonian winds kept us at port for three additional days. With this delay, we left for our working area off southern Argentina.
Watched by our observers (we will talk about their work in a later blog) we turned on our sediment echosounders and started to look for a suitable sampling position. The echosounders enable us geologists to look into the sediment and to assess how thick the sediment layers are.
As soon as we found a suitable sampling position, we lowered our Multicorer (MUC). This device is used to sample the uppermost ~30cm of the seafloor. Back from ~700 m water depth, the MUC was completely empty. Apparently, the sediments have been to hard for this device to penetrate properly.
After this “glitch”, we decided to lower our largest device, the ~2t heavy and 20 m long piston corer and finally got a 10 m long sediment core. Two other geology stations marked the end of a long but successful working day.
While we were working on deck, a group of five used the helicopter to fly to nearby Cape Hoorn Island. They planned to use a mini-version of our piston corer to sample a small lake on that island. Additionally geodetic measurements were conducted but we will report about the land work in another blog entry in a few days.
Greetings from Cape Horn, PS97
Thomas Ronge
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