2007 December 25 (Day 7)
Weather: Cloudy
Site: C0004 (NT2-01I) (33°13’ N, 136°43’ E)

We reached TD at site C0004, Hole D last night at ~midnight, and the procedures for completing the hole and pulling out were commenced. These will be followed by tripping the drill string, recovering beacons, recovering ROV and transit to site C0006, where we will start out with a test of the underwater camera system.

Initial results from site C0004 have proven to be very, very interesting: After drilling through accretionary prism materials (with poor recovery of very highly fractured material), we began to get good recovery materials just above and through the fault zone interpreted from seismic and LWD results. We have several sections with well preserved faulted material, and these are being inspected via CT scan before any splitting, sampling, or other destructive procedure is undertaken.