July 13. The hot day

This day was very hot, in all senses.

Refreshing weather of the first working day has changed by full calm. The morning freshness has turned to day heat. With pleasure participants of expedition put on shorts, t-shirts and sunglasses.

But hot was not only outside, not only on the deck. The samples collected yesterday have “speeded up” the activity in onboard laboratories. In geochemical laboratory the participants worked with gases. Biological laboratory was filled with hundreds of microscopic inhabitants of Baikal depths. And only lunch and dinner were able to temporally grab attention of Stepan, biologist of our expedition, from his microscope.  Lithologists have studied tens of collected samples and were finishing the core descriptions.

The gravity core, “our good friend”, were going down and coming up without tiredness, bringing to us more and more new data on the geological nature of Kukuy Griva.

Today we worked on the other side of the structure. At the beginning we took several cores recovered the section already known to us. But at the end of the day several cores with typical deep-water canyon section were taken. “Boring” clays were replaced by mostly sandy interval section. As a result, the core recovery became shorter. To collect sand from significant depth (almost 1 km here) is not an easy task. It is difficult to penetrate into denser sandy sediments. But also it is a tricky thing to lift the sample on the deck – once the sand can “find” a little hole in the core catcher, it instantly escapes back to the lake, just like in hourglass.

It is worth to be specially mentioned that, in addition to the planned work, today we have carried out successful methodical experiments. Jeffrey - the participant from University of Marie Curie – successfully tested the equipment for measurement of thermal flow of the Earth. He made it with the special sensors installed on the gravity core. The experiment was successful. At the same time we have managed to get both 3 m of sediment section and new data on thermal regime on Kukuy Griva

Bathymetry map with location of some sampling stations taken today

Traditionally, at the end of the day we had the scientific party meeting and lecture. Today the lecture was given by Chief Scientist of the project Grigorii Akhmanov.