5 meters of mud

well, hellow there all. greetings and salutations,

i gues it is my assumption that anyone other than myself and my mother are
reading this blog, so.. hi mom; hi self.. hi back to self (delerium continues as
i talk to myself through my blog). as i jsut said at lunch: 'it is better that
we are laughing endlessly rather than punchin each others' faces'

got a good 2 hr followed by a good 3.5 hr nap last night. feel xhausted (as
usual, but i usually say i am feeling great, becasue i feel great while
exhausted... don't try to make sense of that please). early this am we recovered
an astounding 5+ meters of sediment in a piston core, the second one deployed
from the stern at night. got it all on video, including the deployment and the
retrieval. the trigger core still had zero sediment and we are hard at work
thinking about what to change to better that issue.

we have just arrived at our most southern core location (if this core is
successful). this is the deepest site we have yet cored (6278 meters); the
deepest chris has cored ever. the depth has been below the ccd (carbonate
compensation depth; ccd = depth when carbonates dissolve) for quite a while, so
we have not been finding foraminiferid fossils (made of carbonate). this wil
hamper our age control, but the stratigraphic correlation for segment boundary
testing comes first. ages are still an important part of that (since we do not
have terrestrial earthquake studies to compare to, unlike cascadia -- brian
atwater scoured the bays and estuaries to find that modern bioturbation is
already destroying teh stratigraphic evidence of the 2004/2005 eqs: crabs are
just eating up all the evidence).

our plan, after getting one more successfull piston core, is to transit back
north to phuket taking piston cores where were were denied earlier due to
equipment malfunctions. argghh.

here is a new saying my bunkmate, bart a.k.a. superman, has me saying (he is our
local mental dr, with the multisensor track van he works in is the mental
hospital): life's a bitch and then you are reborn. kinda like a cartoon (like
willie e coyote).

one love, jay