I'm on the R.V. Melville, and we leave San Diego in a bit more than an hour for offshore Santa Barbara. In between here and there, we will be acquiring multibeam bathymetry along the East Santa Cruz basin fault zone, which, not surprisingly, forms the east flank of the 1.8 km-deep East Santa Cruz basin, which is south of Santa Cruz Island. Working with lead P.I. Craig Nicholson and grad student Sarah Schindler, we show these faults to be NE-dipping (oblique?) thrust faults responsible for the shallow Santa Cruz-Catalina Ridge.

We then arrive at night in the middle of Santa Barbara Channel and do piston coring adjacent to cores we took from the same ship in 2005 (Nicholson and others, EOS, 2005). We will core next to a core that contained the 700 ka paleo datum, which contained a high-resolution climate record. That means that we need to drop the multi-ton piston corer with horizontal precision of just a couple of metters so that we can overlap the older core above and below (extend the record older and younger). We will do the same with the next-oldest core, which contains the volcanic ash from the last great Yellowstone eruption...about 620 ka.

We are trying to extend the high-resolution climate record back to as old as 1.4 million years. Jim Kennett said this is the only (known) place in the world that contains this record. The oldest ice core in Antarctica goes back 1 million years, but doe snot show the decadal to even annual changes seen in the cores we took in 2005.

It is the active faults and folds that allow us to do what we are doing.
Chris