After several days of drilling in the Paranal claypan, our team of six drillers and four scientists has successfully established a routine on how to recover and process the valuable cores obtained (Pic 1).

The sediments at the end of the liners already illustrate the presence of hydrological changes, with pebbles as evidence of strong fluvial activity during wetter intervals. In addition, a first inspection of the material implies several volcanic ash layers in the core, which, however, needs to be validated in the laboratory.

Unfortunately, at about 32 meters depth, one of these tephra layers stopped our drilling progress and broke the drilling tool (Pic 2). Thus, we had to abandon our first drill hole (1A) and moved to a new site (1B) a few meters apart to start drilling again. With the experience gained in the first days, we were able to achieve a recovery of 10 meters per day on average, being able to finally pass the critical tephra interval.

On the other hand, in order to guarantee the highest possible level of security in times of the pandemic, all the participants are regularly tested for COVID with the antigen tests that we brought from Germany (Pic 3).

On January 27^th, our colleague Eduardo Campos from the UCN Antofagasta came over for a short site visit (Pic 4). During his stay we could give him some insights into the complexity of the drilling process and the recovery of the sediments.