One of the people who will be very occupied with all of this mud is Trevor Nace. Trevor's Ph.D. dissertation will be based, in large part, on the data collected on this cruise. He will be analyzing the cores with the aim of reconstructing the paleoclimatology and paleooceanography of this region.
Trevor will do the foram stratigraphy, will analyze 18O isotopes in the pore waters, and will do Mg/Ca, Ba/Ca, and oxygen isotope analyses on the forams to reconstruct sea surface temperatures and sea surface salinities. He will use the data from these analyses, in combination with organic geochemical studies of the terrestrial component of the core material, to get a long (~30,000 years) paleoclimate record. Sounds like a great project!
Trevor has already started some of the hard work. While on the cruise, he has spent a lot of time in the wet lab (just forward of the main science lab). He's been squeezing porewater. That is, he's been putting mud from the long cores into a press and, literally, squeezing the water out of it.
Here's how it goes:
Trevor scoops mud from the end of the long core sections,
places the mud in a stainless steel vessel, and uses a jack-like device to squeeze it.
Then, he patiently waits (sometimes for a half hour or more) for the syringe he has put into a hole in the bottom of the vessel to fill up with pore water. Sometimes a little extra squeezing (with the jack) is required.
Once the syringe is full, he removes it from the contraption and ejects the pore water into a bottle.
This is the kind of thing that must be done on the ship -- before the cores dry out and the pore water is lost.
All of the bottles will be shipped back to the lab at Duke, where Trevor will do oxygen isotope analyses on the pore water he squeezed while on board the Knorr -- hoping to get a set of data that will prove useful in his paleoclimate reconstruction.
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