Monday, May 13, 2013

Logged to 1805.7 feet, and a stark change in mineral content at a contact

By the end of today we logged to a depth of 1805.7 ft, 108.5 ft deeper than the last blog update.   The drillers are getting ready to cement the PQ (3.375" inner diameter) casing in place tomorrow, and hopefully we will start drilling the HQ (2.625" inner diameter) portion of the hole later this week.  In the meantime, I'll keep showing you some of the interesting features we've seen while logging:
Here is a close-up of a contact between two pahoehoe flows.  On the top and right you can see the rock is olivine-rich (the greenish minerals), while the rock on the left and below is rich in plagioclase feldspar (white, thin and elongate blades).  There is some soil formed by weathering and erosion at the top of the plagioclase-rich underlying unit, and a thin layer of glass at the interface between flows that has been somewhat altered to yellow palagonite.  The dimensions of the picture are 6 x 4.5 cm.

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