The downtime has given us some time to analyze data from the first two holes to assess the efficiency of our recovery. In lake drilling, each core is brought to the surface in 3 meter increments, which can leave gaps between the 3 meter sections. It can also be difficult to core sands and hard materials. We can just drill through those materials (not coring them), but this leaves additional gaps. We try to fill these gaps by drilling multiple holes at each site. At Towuti Site 1, for instance, we hope to drill 4 holes to get close to 100% recover of the sediments. To assess how well we are doing, we try to correlate geophysical data, such as the magnetic susceptibility (a measure of the concentration of magnetic minerals in the sediment) from each core, and then test this data against measurements of susceptibility made using borehole logging tools (these are sensors lowered down the hole in the bottom of the lake) to assess the gaps using a piece of software called Correlator. It is a quirky program, to say the least. Ryan and I spent most of the morning trying to do this. As you can see from the screenshot below, we were doing pretty well. Then the software crashed. And we started over. (TDP on facebook)