Well, things did not go so well with the coring last night. We were in the areas of the oil platforms SE of Santa Barbara. The first core hit a hard layer, a carbonate, at the sea floor and it slowed the (5 ton?) corer too much to get through 1 m of cover.
The second one came up full of water (also did not penetrate). So, we moved to an area just SE of the UCSB campus...and I went to sleep. The 3rd core (or 4th) got stuck in the sea floor. The cable had 27,000 lbs of pressure (I think) trying to pull it out. The ship made some moves to try and pull it out at an angle. The cable broke. The corer lies in about 60 to 100 m of water on the sea floor. We have a spare corer but now we are nervous about what if we lose that one. These piston corers are not cheap...maybe $80,0000.

The seismic reflection data acquisition and processing are going well. I trained 2 smart grad students in processing starting Nov 7 and now they are getting most of it done.

This morning there were 100s of dolphins or porpoises around the ship herding fish. We have marine mammal observers on board and cannot collect any seismic reflection (acoustic) data while marine mammals are within certain radii. Our sound sources are about 200x less in volume than an oil industry survey would use.

I was sleeping for the dolphin but saw a great sunset last night.
Chris