Hello! This is Nick, and I'm writing about the pollen core project we've been working on for the last few days.

Dave Wahl, a paleoclimatology researcher from Berkeley, came on the plane a few days ago with the new staff, and he has been working with Hillary, Ellery, Marra, and I over the last two days as we built and tested a drilling platform for the middle of the lagoon. We designed the platform to hold a 10 foot tripod, sediment drill, and five people over the deepest part of the western lagoon. It's 12 feet long and 16 feet wide with a hole in the middle for the drill and it floats on gigantic 20 foot styrofoam pontoons we found out behind the workshop.

We're sampling the silty bottom 50 meters below the surface of the water. The goal is to get several 3 or 6 meter long cores of sediment that hopefully will go back 2,500 years in order to search for coconut palm pollen grains. We think the trees may have been introduced here by Polynesians in the relatively recent past (via Fanning Island) and we're trying to pinpoint the time the trees first arrived in Palmyra.

We built the platform in only a few hours yesterday and spent the rest of the time installing the luxury items (an elevated shade tarp and a few comfy lawn chairs) and anchoring and testing the platform. While we were situating the drill this afternoon, I volunteered for the somewhat unsettling job of snorkeling down through the murky water and double-checking the tip. Right before jumping in, Hillary reminded me that, "There are sharks down there, you just can't see them, and there are probably tiger sharks around, so try not to splash around too much." She assured me I had a "high chance of being alright," and then I hopped in. I spent about fifteen minutes in the water diving down to 10 feet and guiding the tip of the drill, and the whole time I was waiting for some big looming shadow to materialize out of the green-tinted waters all around me. All went well until I was back on the platform with my head in the water tieing off the last knots, and a big looming shadow did materialize out of the murk! And it turned out to be Dave Wahl swimming at me from under the other side of the raft with a video camera strapped to his head. In initial fright, I screamed something explicit through my snorkel. I'm sure the video is priceless!

We haven't gotten a sediment core yet, but we did pull up a small practice sample. The sediment down there is super fine and has the exact consistency as toothpaste. We joked that if it didn't smell like hard-boiled eggs, it would make a great face mask at the spa.

Hopefully we will get a few cores tomorrow. Until then, adieu.