I am posting a lot because we are doing a transit to Seattle...we are done our coring a couple days ago...which got a world-class climate record. I am also posting because grad student SH from UCSB is going to write an article...maybe for the news press, maybe with a writer there who did a good job on offshore faults....so might as well post my thoughts than just email them to her. Almost everyone in our science party was a volunteer...some got paid from their regular job (3 USGS people, a couple of faculty). Even the chief scientist, CN of UCSB, and I had used up their funding for this and are essentially volunteers. Our other co-PI...JK, who is in the National academy of science or something (you know, science god and all..), was pretty enthusiastic about the results. Most of them got off at Santa Barbara the other day. Meanwhile, I am doing most of my work with my 4 year old laptop that I had to buy myself...I'm unstuffing a gigabyte of bathymetry and seafloor reflectivity data while running something else...and tossing as many files as i could while doing this to keep ahead of the hard disk filling up. We are funded by NSF and used that to buy a fast computer, which I described earlier...but its speed was a disappointment...maybe twice as fast as my old laptop...should have been 10x or more faster...

Because of the good results, some of the volunteers will be writing their own proposals for the resources to study the cores.

Hmm..I meant to post on too much coffee and lack of sleep and how that makes it difficult to focus on tasks that do require a lot of focus...maybe I'll do that later or maybe it is not so interesting. It was not just me....our cabin, which I shared with another grad student (RD), was right below the coring area...and the coring people would drop heavy things and wake up RD. One morning at 4 AM they were just wailing away banging on the deck above our room and woke me up. But, in suburbia I live near a very active freight railroad (by near, I mean 100 m) at a grade crossing...so a little banging on metal did not usually wake me up...it was my internal breakfast clock that woke me up.

Hey, it's a little rougher here near the Mendocino plate boundary...but the motion on the RV Melville is really not too bad...
Chris