And it happened again.......

November 13, 2014

This week has consisted of a lot of ups and downs for the crew working on the Deep Fault Drilling Program.  Drilling commenced on Sunday and was progressing slowly at about 1-3 meters per hour.  My training continued throughout the drill site and they seem to be preparing for the mass exodus of most of the crew that has been here since October.  So training me on as many jobs as possible is beneficial because it widens my availability in the roles I can fill in the next coming days.  The thin section training was completed and I moved on to DIS training.  Drilling Information Systems (DIS) is a computer software that helps organize and keep up with numerous aspects of the drilling process.  My training is focused on the Curation and Labeling of rock and cutting samples that are generated from the borehole.  In other words, I am mud logging again!  It is actually quite similar to oil and gas industry mudlogging.  A two man team is collecting rock cuttings from the mud circulating through the borehole.  The cuttings are then brought to the science team trailers a few meters away from the drill rig, a sample is bagged and sealed then.  The rest of the cuttings are washed thoroughly and all metal flakes are removed with a magnet.  The washed cuttings are also bagged and sealed.  A small portion of the washed cuttings are then put on a hot plate to dry so that they can be described by one of the lead geologist.  A photo is taken of the dried sample and uploaded to DIS and a very small amount of the sample is given to the thin section team, which is Mike Allen from Liverpool on my shift.  Once the photo is taken I upload the photo on DIS and print a description report for Tim Little to do the description.  Norio Shigimatsu from Japan does a weight percentage calculation based on 100 grains from the dried sample.  Under a microscope, the grains are divided into Quartz, biotite and quartz, biotite, and other.  The individual groups are then weighed and the data is uploaded onto a spread sheet.  All of the individual parts are very important for the drilling process.  The goal for this program is to take core of the main fault slip zone but the exact depth is not known.  So in order to know when coring needs to begin, the geologist have to look at the micro structures within the cuttings, and the mineralogy of the cutting to see the alteration due to the metamorphism of the rocks.  If this isn’t geology, I don’t know what is!  Once all of the information is gathered and processed into DIS or other programs the remaining sample is bagged and sealed.  Each bag is labeled with the depth at which the drill bit was at when the cuttings were collected.  The true depth will be calculated at a later time.  This is all done every 2 meters except the thin section.  The thin section is made every 6 meters and it all continues for 24 hours a day by three different shifts.  Drilling and data collecting was progressing throughout the week and keeping every one quite busy until Tuesday around 11:30 p.m.  The drillers noticed that progress had slowed down dramatically and thought maybe the drill bit needed to be replaced.  They began tripping out of the hole and soon noticed that they had broken off the BHA again and lost it downhole!  We had just spent two weeks fishing the BHA out and only drilled for 2.5 days before it was lost again.  Luckily the drill crew is experienced in fishing now and jumped into action.  The head driller jumped in their airplane, flew to the North Island, picked up a new section of the drill string, flew back and had the BHA out of the hole within 24 hours.  Rupert Sutherland is a bit stressed because of the strict time restraints with the drill rig and the science crew but drilling should commence by November 14^th. 

On a different note, Virginia Toy learned of my past history of being a chef and requested I make gumbo so on Wednesday morning I began attempting to make a very southern US dish on the west coast of New Zealand.  The cooks were very pleased about this because it provided a well-deserved day off for them.  It took most of the day but I was able to produce a Shrimp-Elephant Fish-Chorizo Gumbo and I was taken aback by how much everyone loved it!  I was worried for a bit because of how spicy it was but everyone seemed to really enjoy it and managed to eat most of the 5 gallons I had made.  The cooks gave me a bottle of wine as a thank you and Virginia gave me a glass of her favorite wine as a thank you as well.  The night ended by everyone going to the local pub for a beer.  What seemed to be a bad few days ended very nicely and gave a large boost to the morale of the crew.