Today we took a little time to make our camp feel a bit more festive in preparation for Christmas! Although we won’t have our official Christmas dinner until we can all celebrate together (after we are finished working different shifts), we still had some special treats prepared by our chef Rayanna including Christmas sugar cookies, fruit cake, and white Christmas, an Australian Christmas treat made of puffed rice, dried coconut, powdered sugar, dried milk, and mixed fruit. We also voted and since most of the camp considers the movie “Die Hard” a Christmas movie, we had a showing of it in the mess tent! Amongst the festivities, we continued with initial characterization of the gravity cores, which included X-ray imaging, smear slide observations to look at microscopic composition, and analysis of the microfossil assemblages for an initial assessment of age.

 (more photos see Gallery)