Who would know that even on a drill rig we have artistic masterpieces. Monet, Degas, Gauguin, Minyuk....Minyuk? Yes, PI Pavel Minyuk has created a new art form we call Greasy Impressionism. Pavel gathered up the 4 types of grease (all different colors) used in the rig operations and created this work of genius of our Russian GLAD-800 for the science side of the platform. It will never hang anywhere else unless someone uses a saw to take it out of the wall
Imagine the task of feeding 40 hungry people three meals a day for months and its 370 km (230 miles) to the nearest grocery store. Ludmilla and Vika from Pevek do an outstanding job serving hot meals with as much variety as you can get given the remoteness of the camp and infrequent resupply. Rice, pasta and kasha (gelishka) are staples topped with meat (beef, pork chicken or fish), delicious sauces, and sometimes a cabbage/onion salad. Milk porridge is an alternative offered for breakfast and commonly they make buns topped with a sugar icing. A variety of soups are also offered daily. Best of all, fresh bread is out on the tables at every meal. They produce all of these things in this modest kitchen with three stoves and one small sink.
In the impactite sequence below the suevite we encountered, as expected, fractured and brecciated volcanic target rocks that had been uplifted by maybe a kilometer or more within a minute or so during the formation of the El’gygytgyn impact crater. Studies of shocked minerals in the rocks shown above will provide information on the mechanics of crater formation.
A suevitic breccia – which is a melt-bearing polymict impact breccia (i.e., a rock that consists of broken pieces of many different target rocks, with a little impact melt rock mixed in), from about 316 m below the lake floor, just below the transition from the post-impact lake sediments. The glassy melt rock, which forms during the impact when some of the rock is heated to over 2000°C, is the dark gray frothy inclusion in the center of the core segment.
A most exciting drill core for the impact scientists on the El’gygytgyn drilling project: a polymict, melt-bearing impact breccia, also called a suevite. This rock originates during the crater formation, when during the immensely energy-rich, explosion-like excavation of the crater a kilometer-thick section of target rock is broken to pieces (and some melt is formed), thrown in the air and falls back into the crater, where it is lithified (from a depth of about 320 m below the lake floor).
As we approach the end of April here at Lake E, we are starting to see more wild life at the lake. Within 1 kilometer of the platform the crews spotted a herd of caribou slowly making their way across the lake. Estimates vary but the herd included at least 30 caribou, and may have been as large as 50. In other years we have seen the herds gather in spring in the Enmyvaam River valley that forms the outlet of the lake. Lake E is right on the divide in the Anadyr Mts and is a low pass to north to south travel.
DOSECC Foreman and drilling supervisor Jerry Jensen found it hard to imagine the hydraulics would overheat when the outside temperature was -17 degrees C. But bentonite had gotten into the fins on the radiator. The problem was eventually fixed but not until after Jerry was seen trying to cool the radiator with some snow.
Christian Koeberl, University of Vienna (one of the principal investigators) arrived at Lake E to start studies of the impact rocks as we finalize the drilling at site 1C. Here he is inspecting an impactite core containing strongly fragmented and monomictly brecciated volcanic target rocks, which are part of the central uplift of the El’gygytgyn crater.
Rita Nasyrova has been working with the project as a translator and liaison with other businesses in Pevek since mid January and she has been doing an outstanding job! She works with all of the scientists as they pass through Pevek and also assists with project discussions and written with our Russian Contractor Chaun Mining and also with the ChukotHydroment who are our hosts in Pevek. Rita is also very familiar with the project because her father, Roman, is one of the drillers on our dayshift.
In preparation for moving the rig for hole 1D, drilling and science crews worked to break the drill rig free from the lake ice and spillage around the rig. This was done to see if the rig could be hydraulically jacked up a few centimeters in such a way that we could eventually move the rig as one unit using a bulldozer, after we finish the bedrock sequence in hole 1 C. The jack-up worked well and the entire rig now sits on pieces of wood. Even the few skeptics among us are now very optimistic. The plan is to put sections of dented HQ pipe under the runners and roll the rig on the pipe with one dozer to the new position some 10m from the old hole. The successful jack-up test means that we should be able to move the rig easily and in the shortest amount of time to start drilling hole 1D and replicate the sediment section below -150m.
The ice on the lake is remarkable because its very clear to the point that you feel like you are walking on nothing at all. Yet the ice at the drill pad now averages 2.16 m and its grown 5 cm in the past 2 weeks. The free board has ranged from 8.5 cm to 10.5 cm with little change during despite additional loads such as mud and drill pipes. The average ice temperature is about -10 deg.C which is well below the safe average temperature of -2 deg. C. Between January 22 and April 4, the average thickness along the road to the platform has increased by 44 cm from 104 cm to 148 cm; or 0.6 cm/day. Volker Neth, EBA Engineering, Canada, daily monitors the ice for the project.
Eureka! We reached the impact breccia on April 14, 2009, at 6:55 PM at a depth of -315 meters below lake floor. Using the smaller HQ pipe the crew collected over 27 m of laminated fine grained muds representing probably the earliest record of Lake E in the middle Pliocene. Then without any problems the cores started to come up with full recovery of the impact breccia. The entire camp was all smiles and excited about the collective accomplishment and the quality of the cores. The depth of the contact at -315 m is not too far off the earlier estimated depth of 330 m. Phone calls were made to German PI Martin Melles now back in Cologne and Austrian PI Christian Koeberl is on his way to the field camp next week. Russian PI Pavel Minyuk and American PI Julie Brigham-Grette were on site to share thank yous with the drillers and the science crews. Both were part of the original 6-person team who collected the first sediment cores from the lake in 1998. Its been a long journey to reach this day. Nevertheless we are not done yet; drilling into the breccia now continues.
The Switch to HQ Pipe -- Having reached the load capacity of the drill rig for use of the larger PQ pipe at a depth of 272m below lake floor, today we switched to using the smaller diameter HQ pipe. So now the PQ pipe acts like a casing for the HQ and drilling continues without the PQ weight on the derrick. The HQ is fit with an HQ3 bit on the end, an adapted hard rock core catcher, and a lexan (special plastic) liner so we can continue to recover sediments and drill into the anticipated breccia using the same tools.
Tim Martin, middle school Earth Science teacher from Greensboro Day School, North Carolina, is participating in a portion of the Lake E field operations are part of the US NSF Polar TREC Program (Teachers and Researchers Exploring and Collaborating). Tim is learning about all aspects of the project providing summaries of everything from the Drilling operations and science planning to camp life and observations about the El'gygytgyn crater. Today with the assistance of ARCUS in Fairbanks, Alaska, Tim and PI Julie BG held an "webinar" that included an short on-line powerpoint presentation and question and answers over the iridium phone. More than 200 children from 4th grade to high school age logged in along with teachers and others from across the country. Questions came in from kids in Virginia as well as California about all aspects of the Lake E project.
Our first large batch of cores were today removed from the temperature controlled reefer in camp, and packed up into new thermal boxes to protect them from freezing. These boxes were then quickly loaded onto a helicopter and flown to Pevek where they were also quickly offloaded and trucked to another temperature controlled reefer to await shipment to St. Petersburg for export. The 22 thermal boxes each contained about 12 meters of core at a weight of about 6 kgs per meter. So the entire cargo, including the boxes weighed about 1.76 tons, well under the 2 ton capacity of the MI-8 helicopter. Watching the helicopter fly off to the north, many of us couldn't help but think about the awesome value of the cargo -- both in currency and sweat equity.
Drilling at Lake El'gygytgyn continues slowly but surely as we make our way down through some difficult unexpectedly coarse grained sediment sections below 190 m depth. The lake ice under the drill rig is 2.1 meters thick and exceptionally strong to support drilling operations. Nevertheless given that drilling platforms anywhere can be dangerous work places, we maintain one vehicle at the edge of the ice platform in the unlikely event of an emergency. We also have a balok (one of the small sleeping containers) at the edge of the platform on 24-hour standby stocked with rations and sleeping bags. How do you spell the name of the Russian All-terrain vehicle? The Russian word is shown in the photo. Westechod Wesdechod Vezdehod Vestehotte Vestahot Vastehot Vastahot Vestehoat Vestehaut Vestehoet Vestahoet Vastehoet Vestehoet Vastahoet Vestikhot Veez’dahoot
Drilling efforts at the platform were stopped for roughly 30 hrs over the last weekend to allow engineers from the ICDP Operational Support conduct downhole logging. First the platform crew completed the job of cleaning out and stabilizing the drill hole all the way to -150 m sediment depth by circulating mud (this effectively lines the bore hole walls with mud to keep it from collapsing into the hole). This provided the ideal conditions for down hole logging. Jochem Kück and Martin Töpfer of the ICDP-OSG, are shown here working with winch and instrument probes (sondes). Measurements included magnetic susceptibility, natural gamma, spectral gamma, electrical resistivity, sonic velocity and temperature. They also used an acoustic camera to image the borehole walls for structure and particle size information.
April 1st brought a change in personnel at the camp with the departure of Martin Melles (PI) and three others and the arrival of Julie Brigham-Grette (PI) with six others including the ICDP downhole loggers. They brought with them the replacement tools needed for the drill rig. Drilling resumed almost immediately.
The replacements bits (those for the Bottom Hole Assembly for PQ pipes from Salt Lake City as well as the Tricon for HQ pipes purchased in Magadan) are waiting in Bilibino to be picked up. The helicopter from Pevek is ordered and the weather forecast is good. So, we are hopeful that we will be back in business tomorrow. The waiting time was used for reasonable maintainance, lab, and office work - and for some expansions of the field camp!
The PQ pipe got twisted off again, this time at 117 mblf in Hole 1B. Most likely, the casing became unscrewed during drilling. With this event we have lost our last Bottom Hole Assembly, making further recovery of lake sediments impossible. Consequently, we have to wait for replacement parts before drilling can be continued.
