The weather has turned sour on us, with high winds and waves, so we spent most of day working inside the Thera caldera. We carried out box coring at three sites in the southern and northern basins of the caldera and found some interesting layers of pumice that stopped the box corer in its tracks. In order to try to longer cores we switched to a gravity corer (see photo).

The gravity corer consists of long steel barrel which collects the core and a large lead weight on top to drive it into the bottom. As the name implies it uses the force of gravity to collect the samples. We were able to get longer cores, up to 2 meters but still had problems penetrating the coarse pumice layers. We are hoping that the weather will improve and that we will be able to use the ROV Max Rover outside of the caldera in the morning or afternoon tomorrow. Our dives targets include a series of strange steps on the Thera's flank that may result from the slumping of volcanic deposits into deep water.