We have a watch system where we are on for 4 hours then off for 8. Mine is 12 to 4, AM and PM. Many of us work 12 hours or more per day. As I've posted other times when I've gone to sea I don't function well at sea and can get pretty cranky, as I was the other day. I'd rather have one 12 hour (or 8 hour) watch a day. You work hard and then have to relax to sleep. Since you sleep twice a day, time passes oddly; it seems like I've been here a long time, and right now I think it is Weds, but could be Tues. OK, just checked my computer, it is Tuesday.

We are coring. A core yesterday may have shown a couple of slump events, which if they were cored and radiocarbon dated at several places over tens of km or more would suggest paleo-earthquakes. Some of the people on this ship, such as Leonardo "Nano" Seeber, Marie-Helene "Milene" Cormier, and Cecilia McHugh have been involved in advancing the science of using offshore cores and very high resolution seismic reflection data and bathymetry data to date paleo-earthquakes.

I've been training two Haitian Engineering students to pre-process some of the data we are collecting and enter it into the interpretation software. They will go to Purdue and pursue Ph.Ds with Eric Calais, who has done a lot of field work in Haiti, works with the Haitians, and did lots of intervues with the Haitian radio etc after the quake. We have loaded industry deep seismic reflection data, a little of our new chirp seismic (acoustic), a geotiff of a geologic map, some tiffs of nautical charts, I just loaded some digital faults that John Diebold (marine geophysics legend and bluegrass guitarist and singer) provided. These are from the thesis of Roberte Bien-Aime-Momplaisir. I read and understand French so just read a few lines of the thesis and saw enough to gain confidence in the interpretation. On the other hand, certain interpretations done by industry seem backwards.

Last night, we recorded some data across some of the faults and folds of Bien-Aime Momplaisir, and saw that they were there and deformed the seafloor (so could be active).

Roberte got her Ph.D at the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, the same place and the same advisor as for my D.E.U. degree. The thesis was 1986; I was there in 1984-1985, so we may have overlapped, but I do not recall her.

The president of the committee was Jean Aubouin, who wrote pre-plate tectonics papers on geosynclinal theory. He was smart enough to accept plate tectonics, although the Frnech students has a Russian professor who believed in sea floor spreading but not subduction so was part of the "expanding earth" group.
Don't ask.
Bye, for a few minutes.
Chris