Come Sail Onshore

The second ECORD training course: The Virtual Drillship Experience was held at MARUM, Bremen, from the 7th to the 11th of March 2016. This course originated from the very successful ECORD Summer School, also hosted by Bremen, that includes “Virtual Ship” sessions.  The concept, welcomed by the scientific drilling community, gives participants the opportunity to learn about expedition workflow and various analyses performed during offshore research drilling projects. The focus is more process related than the sister Summer Schools that always centre on one of the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) scientific themes.  In response to the high demand and interest, The Virtual Drillship Experience was created. It is a unique occasion for scientists interested in sailing to become, or to become once more, familiar with IODP. MARUM is the ideal location to host this event: as it is one of the three IODP core repositories, with more than 150 km of cores, as well as laboratories and facilities we can find on a drillship.

Over 5 days, 29 participants from around the world and from different scientific disciplines were immersed in shipboard activities; covering physical properties, core logging, sediment visual core description and smear slide analysis, high-resolution linescan imaging and color scanning, biostratigraphy, pore water acquisition and analysis, and finally, hard rock core description. To guarantee optimal interaction with the tutors and the opportunity to gain hands-on experience with the equipment, participants were divided into 3 groups, rotating between the different labs and practical exercises. Tutors included many experienced senior scientists with significant experience in offshore expeditions, ensuring genuine and relevant examples. Early career researchers Anna Joy Drury (postdoc, MARUM) and Erwan Le Ber (IODP research associate, University of Leicester) also had the opportunity to participate in teaching, giving an introduction to core physical properties, with practicals on a multi-sensor core logger (MSCL) system and on discrete samples (Moisture and Density, Pycnometer).

Sampling session for Moisture and Density

The Virtual Drillship Experience is not only about participants familiarising themselves with offshore workflow and the different data acquisition methods. Our apprentice sailors also had to use their skills and knowledge acquired during the virtual drillship experience to interpret downhole logging data with Sarah Davies (University of Leicester) or to generate core correlations and age models. Participants were also introduced to the more general aspects of IODP; including curation, data management, sample requests and proposal writing. In 5 days, attendees covered the most fundamental aspects of shipboard activities, and we now wish them “fair winds and following seas”.

Click here for more information on The Virtual Drillship Experience, and here for other ECORD Courses and Summer Schools.

IODP Expedition 357: The Real Science Party

Staff from the European Petrophysics Consortium based at the University of Leicester have been working as part of a team on the IODP Expedition357: Atlantis Massif Serpentinization and Life. As the latest phase, the Onshore Science Party (OSP) reaches its conclusion; it’s time to look back at the OSP experience at the Bremen Core Repository at the MARUM in Germany.

IODP Expedition 357 is a major research project that is investigating the link between alteration processes (serpentinization) and extreme life. It has attracted much media attention, including items on the BBC and Bremen radio, not least because of its links to the origins of life and by extension the possibilities of extra-terrestrial life.

The Bremen Core Repository containing over
150 km  of core!

EPC’s involvement in this project centres on providing petrophysical expertise as part of the ECORD (European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling) Science Operator in conjunction with the BGS and MARUM. The offshore phase of this mission-specific platform (MSP) expedition took place in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean between October and December 2015. Dr Sally Morgan, Petrophysics Staff Scientist on the expedition, analysed the ephemeral physical properties on the core whilst offshore as well as coordinating the downhole measurements programme. The core recovered from beneath the Atlantic seabed was then shipped to the Bremen Core Repository arriving there just before Christmas.  This is where the rest of the team came in, lead by Sally, and together forming the physical properties technical team working alongside four international scientists with interests in physical properties.

All of the scientists involved in Expedition 357, the Science Party, assemble for the first time at the OSP, only a few scientists were involved in the offshore phase. The science party includes 30 scientists from 12 countries and they are involved in sampling, measuring rock properties, and working on rock description and characterization. A set of standard measurements are acquired on every IODP expedition to ensure a consistent data contribution to the legacy databases. Broadly speaking these measurements span the disciplines and facilitate characterization of the rocks recovered, including physical properties and high-resolution digital imaging of the cores (the responsibility of Leicester's EPC team). During the OSP reports are written on the expedition data (find them at the bottom of the page linked here), and scientists discuss their personal research projects potentially forging collaborations.

So the Onshore Science Party is serious business, but is it also a party? Well yes and no. These teams worked around the clock (almost literally!) to develop a comprehensive record of the recovered rock in only 17 days! Yet, for many, the OSP is their first contact time with the recovered rocks, generating an almost tangible atmosphere of excitement and anticipation as each core is split and the story revealed. It is a fantastically encouraging environment for budding and early-career scientists: full of potential connections that may lead to future collaborations and opportunities. One such example of this interdisciplinary collaboration developed in the physical properties lab. One of the four science party members was microbiologist  Dr MattSchrenk. Matt’s research focuses on microbial life in extreme environments, and he had requested to be part of the OSP physical properties team so that he could learn about the moisture and density measurements acquired to investigate porosity.  Matt is interested in understanding how porosity might control the location of life within these rocks. The hope is that one day this research arising from Expedition 357 might aid in the search for extra-terrestrial life. A perhaps unexpected, and undeniably interesting connection.

The Expedition 357 OSP has been hard work for everyone involved so far and as the scientists and ESO staff begin to depart to their various corners of the globe, the lingering buzz of anticipation reminds everyone that the OSP is only really the start of the science. 

Sample, Log, Repeat: the quest for dating the retreat of the British Irish Ice Sheet

The BGS vibrocorer on the RRS James Cook

On 3 July 2015 EPC's Sally Morgan departed on a month-long research cruise (JC123) as part of the BRITICE-CHRONO project.

The JC123 cruise, led by Professor Colm O’Cofaigh of Durham University, is the second of 2 marine-based coring programmes that are central to the 5-year BRITICE-CHRONO NERC Consortium Grant which aims to collect and date material to constrain the timing and rates of change of the collapsing British-Irish Ice Sheet (BIIS).  This year’s project was staffed by scientists from a number of institutions across the UK, including the universities of Bangor, Durham, Leicester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Stirling, and Ulster, as well as the British Geological Survey.

Similar to the first BRITICE-CHRONO cruise (JC106) that took place in 2014, JC123 was on board the Royal Research Ship James Cook and set sail from Southampton. The cruise surveyed and sampled material along 3 main transects in The Minch, Shetland and the North Sea areas.  Coring targets in these transects were identified using the surveying data collected on board, notably multibeam echo sounder and sub-bottom profiler data.  Most of the cores were acquired utilising the British Geological Survey’s vibrocorer system (up to 6 m penetration), with a few cores sampled using the National Oceanographic Centre’s piston corer (up to 10 m penetration).  Over 170 individual cores were collected, totalling in excess of half a kilometre of core material. 

Once recovered to the ship, the cores were cut into metre-long sections and curated, after which they were measured on Leicester’s containerised Geotek multi-sensor core logger system, operated by Sally.  This system allows for the acquisition of the physical properties of the cores, including the bulk density, acoustic velocity, magnetic susceptibility and electrical resistivity.  Once the cores were measured they were returned to the core description team who split the cores in half lengthways, sampled and described the cores, and then packed them up ready for shipment to different institutions at the end of the cruise for further analyses (including C14-dating and optically stimulated luminescence dating) and archiving.  Used in combination with the descriptions and geochronological data derived from the cores, the physical properties data will be used to help better understand the timing of the BIIS recession at the end of the last glaciation.   

Work on these cores, the cores acquired during JC106, and material collected from the equivalent land-based studies, will continue through 2017, after which it is hoped that predictive ice sheet modelling will be significantly improved, with the BIIS forming an important benchmark.

Further information about the project is available via the BRITICE-CHRONO webpage and you can also follow the project’s progress on Twitter:  @BRITICECHRONO

Robots, rocks and research drilling

Seabed rock drills are a developing technology with the potential to offer a cost effective way of recovering geological materials from beneath the sea.  More conventional technologies drill and sample the sub-seafloor utilising drilling systems that are on board a ship or platform.  Seabed rock drills are robotic drilling systems that are deployed from a ship and lowered to the seafloor, attached to the ship by an umbilical which as well as providing a physical connection, also allows for the drill to be remotely-controlled and monitored by engineers on board. The latest version of the BGS rock drill is designed to drill and core up to 50 m below the seafloor and is set to be one of 2 such devices to be used on the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) Expedition to Atlantis Massif later in the year.  The second system to be utilised on this project is the MeBo80, a seabed rock drill developed by MARUM, University of Bremen, Germany.

On 17 August 2015 Sally Morgan, of the European Petrophysics Consortium (University of Leicester), joined the Northern Lighthouse Vessel Pharos with colleagues from the British Geological Survey (BGS) to test the latest iteration of their seabed rock drill, RD2. 

In addition to drilling and coring holes in the seabed, BGS have also purchased downhole logging probes to be deployed in the holes once drilling is completed.  These battery operated probes, will record in situ measurements of the physical properties of the formations that have been penetrated, as the drill string is retrieved to the rig.  Sally was invited by BGS to participate in the trials cruise in the Firth of Lorne as the downhole logging specialist.  She will be providing technical support and guidance on the logging tools and associated data during the trails and beyond.

The trials cruise on the Pharos is co-funded by the European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling (ECORD), the BGS and industry partners.