After all, tomorrow is another day!

Our first cores came in today giving me plenty to do. My work is pretty unglamorous, involving the division of sediment which is labeled, bagged and frozen. On some samples I also squeeze the water from sediment to be analyzed later. Sounds simple but the samples must be meticulously processed so that analyzing them when we get back to UNC will go smoothly. Keeping everything tidy is also important.

Our sediment porewater processing set-up

The weathers looking good for today and our technical failures appear solved, so hopefully we'll have several more cores on the next shift.

My piecemeal sleep schedule is already starting to catch up to me. We had a mandatory safety drill last night at 7 to go over all of the ship's policies, a time when I could normally have been sleeping. But, in my downtime, good food and swapping stories of past cruises with some of the older researchers has kept my morale high.