9 August, 2001

Lots of Rocks

Today we pulled in our 6th dredge full of rocks. We now have a large variety of igneous types common from ocean ridges. Included in our samples we have found basalt, obsidian, peridotite, gabbros, diabase, and 1 sandstone pebble the size of a quarter. The geologists are very excited.

I spent the morning from 5:30 until 11:30am up to my elbows in rocks. We washed several buckets of rocks that came up in a dredge in the middle of the night, then began to catalog a batch from yesterday. Cataloging includes painting a white square on each rock, then writing a number on it. We then write down the number of each rock on a table, and record observations about it including its length, width, and height, the weathering of its surface, its angularity, its texture, and recording the absence or presence of a coating called manganese oxide. Another scientist and I did this for 175 rocks, and we have thousands more to go! After we do the cataloging, other scientists will take each rock and begin to analyze them more closely.

Statistics:

Latitude: 84 25 N

Longitude: 2 05 E

Air temp: 34 F

Water temp: 31 F

Here the scientists are bringing in another dredge full of rocks. Each dredge can hold up to 800 pounds of rocks. <>

One of the lead scientists, Steve Goldstein, poses with a few of the many rocks we have acquired <>