Eleven participants from Quebec City, Rimouski and Montreal met in Quebec City for the first PASADO Quebec workshop. PhD students and postdocs showed their first results and introduced their upcoming projects including volcanology, magnetostratigraphy, densitometry, microstratigraphy, radiogenic isotopes as well as diatom and chironomid analyses. The new PASADO Canada website (http://can-pasado.ete.inrs.ca/) was introduced and the workshop was also used to facilitate the excellent communication among the four working groups from Quebec.
Hurray and three cheers for the sampling crew! Today the last set of samples taken with 2 cm increments was recovered from the 107 m long PASADO composite profile. During this enormous effort a total of 35,217 individual samples for various bioproxies, stable isotopes as well as for geochemistry and physical properties was secured, labeled and stored away.
Only a few days to go and we will be done with subsampling the entire composite profile of Site 2 with 2 cm resolution. This tedious job lasted four months! For the remaining three months of this year there are still some other sampling tasks to do for tephrochronology, radiocarbon and OSL dating. Moreover, Site 1 will be split, described and scanned with various methods.
The first German PASADO Postdrilling Workshop took place September 8-10, 2009 in the beautiful rural environment of Hellwege, 40 km east of Bremen. The aim of this meeting was to discuss the strategic mid- to long-term planning to achieve the given scientific goals in the best possible way. Following an appraisal of the current state of the art and of the international collaboration, scientific aims and perspectives were named (1. improving the understanding of processes with monitoring and modelling; 2. improving the chronology; 3. use of new and quantitative proxies; 4. investigation of additional sites) and substantiated by ideas for new projects. Finally, a clear need to improve communication between project scientists became evident. Measures were suggested and will be realised soon. One of these actions is to organise PASADO workshops in conjunction with the AGU Fall Meeting in December 2009, the DFG-IODP/ICDP Colloquium in March 2010 and the EGU Conference in May 2010. The minutes (17 pages in German) are available upon request.
During the PASADO Microfossil Workshop Argentinean and German scientists visit the University of Bremen to have a closer look at the GEOPOLAR laboratories where sediment cores where split, described, scanned and subsampled for a multitude of different analyses that are scheduled to be carried out.
The 1st ICDP PASADO Microfossil Workshop took place July 5-10, 2009 in Cologne and Bremen, Germany. Major aims of this workshop were (1) to compile agreements of cooperation between the different international groups that study the microfossil record of Laguna Potrok Aike, (2) to document all methods that are used for the specific microfossil analyses, and (3) to develop a compendium of common and unknown microfossil taxa (references, descriptions and photographies) that enables every involved scientist to step into microfossil analysis of PASADO sediment cores. The draft of this Microfossil Manual is currently under revision and will be available online soon.
After sediment cores from Site 2 have been split, scanned with different methods and the continuous composite profile was pieced together, subsampling started as scheduled during early June at the University of Bremen.
The very last day of PASADO field work. While all containers have been packed and are ready to be picked up by trucks, today the dismantling of Potrok City started while the last scientists and the kitchen team left. The remaining 'ghost town' will be taken out soon. Then there remain no more signs of our presence.
After all drilling operations were finished the Patagonian weather demonstrates that calm days do exist even at this southernmost tip of the continental Americas.
A storm with maximum wind speeds of 177 km/h at the Potrok Aike meteorological station was chasing tons of dust particles and other items, like for instance a washing machine, through Potrok City. There was not even a slight chance to obtain sediment cores during such days.
In some parts of the world today the carnival season is beginning. In Argentina people celebrate the day of the gaucho. This was the reason for the gauchos Mario and Luiz from the neighbourhood to invite all inhabitants of Potrok City to an Argentinean style barbecue called asado.
Today other scientists returned from jolly trips to interesting places in southern Patagonia and beyond. These trips led them to the glacier of Perito Moreno, the hiking resort of El Chaltén, the Monte Leon National Park, Cabo Virgenes, the city of Ushuaia on Tierra del Fuego and to Puerto Natales in nearby Chile.
