Processed to 3125 feet, a pair of contacts

Today we processed rock core to a depth of 3125 ft.  That's 119 ft of core since yesterday, which is just about the maximum amount we've processed in a single day during the project.  The HQ drilling is definitely going quickly!  During processing, we saw many of the features I've been mentioning lately in this blog: baked soil contacts, glassy margins between pahoehoe flows, elongate olivine, olivine settling within flows, clay filling fractures, slickensides or slickenfibres, etc.  Here are a couple of the contacts we saw today:

The contact on the left is something we're used to seeing; soil baked to orange when the overlying flow covered it (the underlying flow is in the next column of the core box and could not be included in the photo).  These kinds of contacts are obvious and easy to interpret.  The contact on the right shows no baked soil at all, but there is baking of the underlying rock to a reddish brown color.  That baking and the change in mineralogy across the coloration boundary define the contact.