Question: What sort of things are you looking for in the rock samples and sediment cores, and do you ever find anything unusual/unexpected?

Christian Maerz answered on 17 Jun 2013:

Well, on this specific research cruise, we are actually looking for loads of different things in the sediment cores. There are some people looking at the physical properties (e.g., how dense is the rock?), magnetic properties (which is important to determine when the sediments were deposited), simply what the sediments look like (which can, for example, tell you if icebergs were present at a certain time, because they drop pretty big stones onto the sea floor), or what kind of fossils they contain (in this case, really tiny fossils that tell you the age of the sediment).

As geochemists, we are interested in chemical and biological processes that are going on within the sea floor. Because the sea floor is FULL of microbes that feast on the organic material (mostly dead algae). We can trace the activities of these microbes by analysing the chemistry of the water trapped inside the sediments, the so-called pore waters.

And just the other day, we found pretty high concentrations of methane deep in one of the cores! Methane is the gas that you also use in your gas stove at home, and in the sediments it is produced by specific microbes. Also some other patterns in the pore water chemistry look kind of unusual, and to answer your question: We find unusual and unexpected things all the time! We still know very little about all the different chemical and biological processes going on in the sea floor, so our research is real exploration to see things no man (or woman) has seen before 🙂