Coring has proceeded very well. By the end of the day today a total of 25 coring runs had been completed. Core quality and the core recovery rate is excellent. The hole is now down to 1019 m depth. Gas hydrate is most frequently found filling the pore space of medium-grained sand horizons. Scientists in the field have been sampling the gas hydrate-rich core and storing the samples in sealed pressure vessels, cooled with liquid nitrogen. Problems encountered in sealing the vessels properly with rubber O-rings at -35EC temperatures have been solved. Les Kutny (Aurora College/IRC) has been ferrying the samples from the rig to the lab in Inuvik where spirits are very high. The sedimentology, physical properties and pore water geochemistry labs are all in full production mode as are the GFZ petrophysics team, the JNOC acoustic and dissociation testing teams and the GSC/USGS testing crews. They are in the happy situation that there is more core arriving than they can handle in a single, very long, day.

GSC sedimentologists Pat Brennan-Alpert and Barbara Medioli in the sedimentology lab, describing the core.

Hideaki Takahashi (JAPEX), Mallik 2002 operations manager, giving a daily briefing on the successful coring, with a CBC camera crew filming.