2007 December 20 (Day 2)
Weather: Fine but Cloudy
Site: C0004 (NT2-01I) (33°13’ N, 136°43’ E)

We spudded into C0004C at approximately 5:30 AM this morning, and collected the mud-line core at about 6:00 AM. Since that time coring has been ongoing with excellent speed and quality. We have also had three very successful runs with the APCT tool.

Core processing is going well - cores are being cut and curated at the core cutting area with excellent efficiency-samples for Interstitial Water are selected, cat-scanned and processed within a matter of minutes. Following complete core CT scan, the sample intervals for the Microbiology samples are chosen and these samples are also being process with great efficiency. The first cores are now starting to roll out of the bench measurement area at an increasing pace, and following the selection and collection of Geotechnical/Physical Properties whole round samples, the cores will be split and processed in the VCD and Structure/Sampling areas.

During the wait for core to describe, the structure, phys props, sedimentology groups, as well as Ginny Lowe (who has been incredibly helpful) took some "extended introductory" training on J-CORES with Kyoma Takahashi. People are beginning to get more comfortable with the system, and we are starting to think about ways to speed up the description-to-data-recording process.

The various discipline-based scientific groups are now starting to work very well together, and we expect to be running at full speed within the next few hours.