Daily Journal

Saipan

Dave's Log

We are all back in Saipan now, and have been making an inventory of the samples we've collected over the past 2 weeks of intensive fieldwork. We are happy that we've managed to sample geothermal fluids at the islands of Alamagan, Pagan, Agrigan and Uracas and to obtain lavas and tephra at these islands and the other 5 in the chain. All these samples will be transferred back to our respective laboratories so that the analytical part of the project can begin. Over the following months, we will be obtaining geochemical and isotopic data on our samples and working it up for presentation at various scientific meetings and for publication in various scientific journals. Some of these results will form the basis of Ph.D. and/or M.S. theses of the graduate student participants (Lillie, Maarten and Jenn). We're looking forward to seeing how the results turn out, and will update these web-pages to inform readers of our progress.

Attention will now also turn to the second part of our project - namely, the Izu-Bonin section of the IBM system. Toby is spending the month of May (2004) in Toyko at the Institute for Earthquake Research in the University of Tokyo. While in Tokyo he will start organizing the logistics for fieldtrips in the Izu-Bonin islands. We will liaise with the Japanese Geological Survey who will act as our partners/collaborators on this part of our project. Again, stayed tuned to these web-pages for details of this part of our work.

I finish with a big thank you to Wayne Suiter and his team at SIO for bringing these web-pages to you. It was quite a production to get all the material back to Wayne but he managed to organize and synthesis it into the material you're seeing now. Stayed tuned for more!