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TODAY'S WEATHER
Bob “Yogi” Elder carefully slides the electronic chassis out of its pressure housing. These units are the “brains” of Argo II. Craig Elder is helping.
Heading to port! At 1115 hours local time, we hauled up the last dredge from the eastern volcano in the Galapagos Rift valley. Our deadline to finish sampling was 1200 hours. Thanks to the great ship handling by the Bridge watches, and the expert support by the winch controllers we did all the sampling we had planned. In the last dredge we recovered two types of lava from inside the crater and at the top of the volcano. One type was glassy and younger, and the other older and blocky The blocky lava appears to be slightly magnetic. Mike Perfit thinks this rock may be have high concentrations of iron and titanium. It is called a “FeTi basalt” after the chemical symbols for those two elements. It is a rock type that forms when magmas have cooled for a long time in a magma chamber before they are erupted. The geochemical analyses of these samples that he will do back on shore will tell Mike if he is right. As we picked the rocks out of the dredge bag, RV Melville did a slow turn and began the four day transit to Manzanillo, Mexico. As the science team finishes up the last bit of data compilation and copying, and we pack up the vehicles and all our equipment, I thought you might be interested in a summary of all the different types of data we have collected during this expedition. As you can see from the list that follows, this expedition has been exceptionally successful and productive thanks to all the hard work by every person on board RV Melville, and the shore based support staffs at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who helped make this expedition possible. I thank them all for their dedication, effort and good spirit during this field program. Cruise Statistics:
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Woods
Hole Oceanographic Institution
