Monday, January 25, 2010

Green mud with burrows and no ice rafted debris

Todays core logging provided some nice animal burrows that were made more than 10 million years ago. As the creature was crawling through the mud, the burrow backfilled, which produced these nice structures. Drilling is continuing at a fast pace and the drill string extends to hundreds of meters below the sea floor. We are now not seeing many large stones or ice-rafted debris, so we may have traveled back into a warmer period already. These rocks show us that the Antarctic climate was changing in the past: from iceberg environments to an environment with no icebergs and a strongly burrowed sea floor. Pretty interesting huh? Let's see what tomorrow will bring...
Also: the video of our second week on the ship can now be viewed here.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey Dr. Passchier,
Hope all is well in the Arctic, I'm a little jealous that you are there, it is my dream to someday go to Antarctica. The weekly video reports and interesting and entertaining, I really enjoy watching them. Also what really got me was the Penguin Tv, that's hilarious. The 1st of Paleobiology went well, Dr. Seth is a great professor. Good choice. Keep posting some videos and pictures. See you soon.