A new tramway line to the drilling site? No, just fixing the wireline winch. The 200th core was extracted, and some euhedral sulphide crystals found inside a fracture. Current borehole depth is 522.4 m.
New week, new crews: while re-insertion of the rods into the borehole began, the joint interpretation of logs and core scans has been completed. A strategy meeting is scheduled for tomorrow. In the meanwhile, 25 interested high-school students visited the site and benefited from a special lecture by Andrew Greenwood (see photo).
A second optical televiewer logging session today has revealed a bit more of the borehole walls than on Thursday, the images are being picked and merged with previous datasets. We also sampled the fluids under (but separately from) the persisting rain, and collected a good amount of the rising gas bubbles (see photo). Drilling should resume tomorrow.
A quiet day on site, spent mostly with data processing and analysis, storing the outflowing fluid, and tidying the compound. All data seem to point to steeply dipping foliation, a joint interpretation is in preparation to put everything in perspective. On this note, the photo shows our DT-1b site from – 200 m depth.
A beautiful, sunny December morning has seen a lot of pipes come out of the hole in preparation for logging. As the Sun has set behind the mountains at 13h, the logging lab has started to be installed. By the late evening a successful optical and acoustic televiewer logging has nicely imaged the bottom 60 m, respectively 250 m, of the borehole. Credits go to Andrew, Ludovic, good preparation, and our new winch.
The crossing of the 500 m depth level has been celebrated in the early afternoon, when the 6th core out of today's 7 has seen light. The pulling ability of the rig is now fully functional. The current bottom depth is 504.3 m, drilling resumes on Monday. Until then, a geophysical logging program is on the agenda, to evaluate the position of the borehole with respect to the geological structure more precisely.
Efforts continued overnight and all day to fix the presumably last bug of the new rig. When it drills, cores are produced very quickly, but pulling remains irregular. Six cores produced in the past 24 hours, reaching 483 m depth. Today has seen several visitors on site, in particular the CEO and chief geologist of the drilling company, all in a positive atmosphere.
The day plan included a rapid change of rigs, which ended up taking the whole day. Nevertheless, the new, strong and blue PSM-16GT rig became operational in the late evening, and a night-shift crew left from the side of their beds to pick up work and hopefully new cores, restarting from 465.4 m depth.
After loss of circulation and sudden stop of rods in the morning, the drilling could continue and went beyond 450 metre depth. The evening has brought full-house attendance at the local town hall meeting, in the cinema/theatre room, with 1.5 hours of presentations followed by a Q&A session.
Another drill bit got worn down and required changing, see the very clear photo comparing the old and new bits. Changeover takes quite some time at 438.8 m depth. We hope the new bit will last at least as long as the previous ones.
After 7 weeks of drilling, core-box number 100 was filled with cores, and the hole reached 429.5 m depth. Large leucocratic layers were observable on most cores. The site is now fully restored after yesterday's storm. A public event in the village Ornavasso that is hosting the drill site will take place Friday evening.
Soon after breaking the 400-metre-depth line this morning, wind gusts attacked the drillsite and overturned every tent and gazebo, dismantled the fences and more. Thanks to a major effort of the on-site team, everything was reconstructed by the evening. In the meanwhile the drillers have produced at least 12 metres of fresh core, quality-wise similar to yesterday.
The week-end has seen the arrival of the microbiology microscope, verified by looking at the tracer. The hunt for microbial activity traces can start for good! Today coring is back on track, with a beautiful, straight, continuous 3-m-long HQ core extracted from 390 m depth, sampling a sharp metapelite–amphibolite contact.
Binary file (standard input) matches Today's picture, ""The Lost Catcher and the Old Bit"", turned out to be a shorter story than ""The Old Man and the Sea"", but for DIVE it was still an award-winning event as drilling could then continue and reach 372.4 m depth.
Not every day brings good surprises. Today the core catcher broke (see on the left of the photo). Most of it could be pulled out, but a piece remained at the bottom of the hole (similar to what is highlighted with the arrow on the right). Hopefully it will be still attached to the piece of core lost during the recovery.
