Sunday 24 December 2023

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 and fruit cake. It also included White Christmas, an Australian Christmas treat made of puffed rice, dried coconut, powdered sugar, dried milk, and mixed fruit. 

We 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.

Christmas penguin by Jae Il Lee
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Deepest-ever rock core extracted from under Antarctic ice sheet

Deepest-ever rock core extracted from under Antarctic ice sheet

18 February 2026

Analyses will help to reveal how far the West Antarctic Ice Sheet retreated in the past — and what it might do in the future.

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Scientists Drilled Into Antarctic Ice Until They Met Bedrock, Then Got A 228-Meter Sample Of Sediment

Scientists Drilled Into Antarctic Ice Until They Met Bedrock, Then Got A 228-Meter Sample Of Sediment

18 February 2026

Scientists have just got their hands on a 228-metre (748-foot) core sample from the muddy bedrock beneath West Antarctica’s chunky ice sheets. Inside the record-breaking sample, they discovered fossils of marine organisms that date from a time when this area was an open, ice-free ocean.

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