Tuesday, February 8, 2005...

Those of us involved in curating the rocks recovered by Jason II had a non-stop day of describing, sawing and sub-sampling the enormous volume of rocks that arrived from the ocean floor using the “elevator” (see photo of elevator with yellow buoyant spheres). Since the depth of the ocean floor here is ~4000 m (~2.5 miles), it takes the elevators about 3 hours to rise to the surface. Jason II imaging continued round-the-clock as well (see photo of the mechanical arm holding the “geocompass” to take an orientation reading on the ocean floor).