After four weeks in Patagonia, the expedition has come to an end. Partially due to ideal weather conditions but mostly due to the great team, we could take full advantage of the 12 hours of daylight and of every hour onboard. We eventually managed to reach our goals and mapped a total area of approximately…
Since our arrival in Tortel, we unfortunately experienced the humid weather conditions which are so characteristic for the Chilean fjords. However, things have changed for the better and since the survey started, we went from pinging in the rain to bright sunshiny days. Thanks to the favorable weather conditions, we already completed half of the…
A few days have gone since we arrived in Chile. After some delay, our last bits of equipment finally arrived at CIEP (Centro de Investigación en Ecosistemas de la Patagonia), the institute of our collaborators in Coyhaique. Although this was a major step forward, our final destination, Caleta Tortel, was still 500 km away. In the…
Seven months have passed since the last field expedition in January, so it is time for us to head back and continue our GLOF adventure. I exchanged my Chilean summer expedition luggage for some warm winter clothing since weather forecasts predict temperatures barely climbing above freezing point. For this expedition, the plan is to map the…
“Tumble out of bed, and stumble to the… platform!” The last couple of days we have been in a working haze. Last week, the new barrel and ground plate finally arrived in Anchorage, so we drove immediately to Anchorage and picked it up. Since we had to leave Cooper landing after the weekend, we basically had a long…
While we are waiting for the equipment to arrive in Anchorage, we retrieved the left behind anchors and ropes. Also, we collected 19 short cores. Most of them will be used for mapping and analyzing the characteristics of the 1964 megaturbidite in the deep basin. Also some will be used for geotechnical slope stability and…
Last Thursday, we were pulling up a 3m-core when suddenly winds came up, causing dangerously high waves in only half an hour. We secured our equipment and took off with the boat. Friday, the storm reached his peak, creating waves of almost 3 meters! Therefore we could not go on the lake to check our…
A few days ago we finished our first coring location. In total we took eight cores of three meters, i.e. 0-2 m, 3-6 m, 7-10 m, 11-14 m and the overlaps 1-4 m, 5-8 m, 9-12 m, 13-16 m. We also collected two short cores. So we retrieved in total 16 meters of sediments. It…
In case we want to core from 0-3 m, which is from the lake bottom down to 3 meters in the sediments below, we will follow the next scenario. First we put down the ground plate with the 3 tubes and funnel attached on top. This installation on the lake bottom (200 m deep) will…
Once we found the coring location on the lake with the GPS, it is important that the platform stays fixed on the same spot, because we have to core several days in a row in the same hole. Therefore, we first started with anchoring our mothership. We measured the length of the anchor ropes, as…
A few days ago, we built the coring platform “Ikea style”: we unloaded a very compactly packed boxtruck, then, we laid out the different bits and pieces of the platform and we put it back together, very slowly, with the usual mistakes and missing bolts… We also had a look at the different parts of…
This is so true for a coring campaign. Before heading to the wild waters of Skilak Lake, we made sure that all the material that was necessary for coring, was present and ready for operation. Therefore, we spent a few days in the warehouse of the USGS. We bought missing supplies. We loaded the truck,…
