Hello All, posting by satellite from R.V. Melville. We are sitting waiting to drop a piston core near the site of Ocean drilling Program 893, where a decade ago Jim Kennett got 24 hours of drilling time and recovered a 200 m core which preserved a record of climate between present and 160,000 years. The pattern over the last few tens of thousands of years matched an ice core taken in Greenland...showing sudden climate changes. During warm periods like today Santa Barbara Basin is anoxic so critters do not disturb the layering. This preservation and the high sedimentation rate makes laminated sediment. We just took the climate record back to half a million years ago. Of particular interest is the set of Mona Lisa cores taken in what we think is the rapid warming that occurred a little over 400,000 years ago.....we actually captured a sudden climate change from glacial to interglacial in a 3 m -long core....

We were able to do this with short cores because the active Oak Ridge fault is mostly blind...most of its slip is absorbed by the fold...which has propagated west into the deep bathymetric basin, taking the deep anoxic strata and folding them up to where they are eroded at the seafloor.

Having the climate-based stratigraphic record allows precise control on how rates of fault slip change on time scales of 100,000 years...

Tommorrow we use seafloor mapping to follow an active but almost unknown fault for a 100 km or more on our way to Seattle...

Chris