In
following with the Japan/Australia exchange, Kosuke and I had the opportunity
to travel to the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. The purpose
of this trip was to collect subsamples from marine sediment cores extracted
from offshore Sabrina Coast, Antarctica. These marine sediment cores were
extracted during the Sabrina Seafloor Survey in early 2017. Leanne Armand, one
of the chief scientists onboard the RV Investigator, agreed to let us come
sample the cores.
 |
| With RSES Director Stephen Eggins |
We
arrived on a Wednesday morning and decided to go straight to work. Dr. Bradley
Opdyke, another voyage participant, had already subsampled the cores and was
kind enough to allow us to take subsamples from his subsamples at the Research
School of Earth Science (RSES) at ANU. We also had the opportunity to listen to
a presentation by PhD candidate Vikashni Nand. After the presentation we met
the director of RSES, ANU Dr. Stephen Eggins and were able to catch up with an
old friend from AORI.
The
next few days we went to Geoscience Australia with Professor Yokoyama to sample
the Sabrina cores. Leanne and Alix Post were wonderful hosts to us as we traveled
to and from Geoscience Australia. Over the course of three days we took more than 600 samples! We chose to take subsamples of the two longest piston cores, 16m and 13.5 m, as well as one kasten core (~3 m) to refine our analyses. We
will be analyzing 14C to determine the age of the cores, 10Be/9Be
ratios to discover ice sheet dynamics and 10Be depositional
processes, and we are also planning on analyzing Carbon/Nitrogen ratios (C/N) and Total Organic Carbon (TOC). These results
will be compared with data from other scientists we are collaborating with on
this project.
This trip to Australia was a valuable
experience in learning how to take subsamples, and for the information to be gleaned
from these samples, but more so for the connections we made with others. In
our free time we were able to meet with scientists and students like us from
countries across the world. Some of these meetings hold the promise of future
collaborations.
We also saw kangaroos for the first
time!
