July 15th.The first leg, goodbye! The next one, hello!
The 1st leg of our expedition has finished quickly. It was full of different events. During this time almost everyone was turned into a “true marine geologist”. We took nearly 50 gravity cores and acquired new material on seeps. Everything is changing. Recently, a second methane plume has appeared on the “Krasnyi Yar” seep. That’s why we should visit that place again in a year. In fact, during all out TTR expeditions we took 190 gravity cores and 150 cores had temperature’s sensors on them to measure the temperature gradient in the sediment.
Now our scientific ship “Vereschagin” is staying in Listvyanka. The winch and the engine do not make noise. Today is the day of “peresmenka”, which means that Jeffry, Tatyana and Andreika K are going to come back home and we are waiting for new participants of our expedition. Among them are Vanni, Andrew and Kirill. Until the last minutes, Jeffry and Andreika K. hurries up to finished his GIS project, Tatyana does her last measurements of water in the region of Krasnyi Yar. They will pass on their knowledge to the next participants. After the short and quick meeting, we hurried up with our new friends, preparing to leave again. Someone needs to prepare his geophysical instruments, someone else needs to discuss preliminary results. Participants of the 1st leg run to the shop to replenish their reserves of fruits and sweets.
Also, we all should take a photo together and do everything during 2 hours! In the middle of all of this activity two journalists from “Russia” channel came to interview us. Already today we will see ourselves in the evening news. Soon we had to part from our new friends. We went away from each other to the opposite sides: the expedition went to the east and Tatyana, Andrew and Jeffry came to the west by car.
Our ship ran across the north-east wind that is called “Verchovic”. Sometimes waves were 2 meters high and the wind’s speed was nearly 15 meters per second. In spite of that we continue moving to our aim because today we have to take several gravity cores and try out our new geophysical equipment. In fact to the end of the day we took two cores with the length about 2-2,5 meters.
After supper “professor” Arthur Kudaev (we honestly believe he will soon be a professor) told us very interesting lecture about gas migration pathways and its distribution in bottom sediments in lake Baikal using method of X-ray tomography after that we tried to follow all Baikal’s traditions.
Oleg Mikhailovich
