28 July. COMMA.

Definitely the main event of the day was the meeting to present our preliminary data. The participants of the expedition and their colleagues from LIN SO RAS summarized the data collected and their preliminary interpretation. We discussed ideas and plans for future work offshore.

Therefore we started the preparation in the early morning. Regardless the fact that the team changed accommodation to a guesthouse of the Limnological Institute located nearby the ship (Karavanka) we kept the usual working schedule: wake up at 7:30 and breakfast at 8:00, then at work.

Lithologists efficiently check the logs of the collected cores, geophysicists are busy copying the numerous Gb of data, geochemists and thermo-physicists summarize their logged data with many hundreds subsampled intervals. And finally it’s time: 4 pm. Everything is ready in the room, the projector is beaming and presentations uploaded. Go ahead.

We run again through the events of the last three weeks in 2.5 hours. Area after area profile after profile and core after core, three weeks of hard but amazing work. Three weeks of life!

Jingling of glasses, mutual congratulations for the good job done, final packing, night walk in Listvyanka, moon pathway over the lake spreading the reflections all over Baikal-father. This is not the end, this is a bold comma.

Thanks to everybody who was followed our work and adventures through this blog. We will definitely continue next year, and may be someone from our followers will wish to be part of our family of marine geologists.

P.S.

And in case anyone of you had the impression that we all were just taking funny pictures and having sunbaths, I will provide some statistics: 172 km sidescan sonar lines acquired, 598 km of subbottom profiler lines, 177 m (85 stations) of core recovery, 758 thermophysics measurements, 708 gas samples, 478 sediment samples collected for different analyses, 12 students and 10 scientists and supervisors from 9 organizations and institutes, 8 investigation areas, 22 days of expedition, and countless emotions.

Dmitry Korost

Photo Svetlana Bubnova