Category: post expedition work
It is just a bit more than two years since I made my last post here, and since we had the sampling party to take the material from our fantastic expedition back home.
Today, the first major scientific results of our endeavour were published in the journal Nature. The team led by Jorg Pross, which included myself and my graduate student Claire Huck, found amazing evidence from spores and pollen in the very old cores we recovered. These cores reached back to the early Eocene, a time which is often described as part of the ‘Greenhouse world’. Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were a lot higher back then, probably similar to what we would get when burning all our fossil fuels.
Finally the long time without my ship mates was over …
From 15 June to 25 June many of the shipboard participants from IODP expedition 318 met again in College Station, Texas, to bring the first stage of our science mission to conclusion, and make a start to the second stage. The first stage of course was the seagoing part, which you all could follow through the blogs. As I mentioned in my blogs, part of the job when sailing as a scientist in the Integrated Ocean Drilling Programme is to write a lot of reports. Every time we finished drilling at a new site in the ocean, a full report had to be written up, describing the operational side of things, but also the sediments we found, what ages they had, and what their physical properties and geochemical composition was.