The rotary diamond drilling in the Paranal claypan continued with an intense pace. We retrieved one core after another, giving us barely enough time to process them before getting a new one. After a huge effort and having surpassed several technical challenges, on Friday February 11^th we finally reached the basement of the basin at a depth of 171 meters. This finding confirms the geophysical estimates based on Transient Electromagnetics (TEM) performed in late 2019 by Barbara Blanco and other members of the CRC 1211, that were recently accepted for publication in the Journal of South American Earth Sciences. The contact to the basement rocks consists of a clear transition from coarse fluvial sediments to a highly weathered intrusive bedrock. By reaching the base of the sediment infill of the Paranal claypan while recovering most of the sampling material, we achieved the main scientific goal of this deep drilling operation!

After finalizing the hole 1B at 174 m, with the last two cores consisting entirely of bedrock, our drilling team moved to a new position. In order to facilitate the logistics for the drilling operation, we set the new hole 1C directly between the holes 1A and 1B. The purpose of this new hole is to duplicate the critical transition between fine-grained and coarse strata at approximately 52 meters depth and to recover the 50 meters of the fluvial sequence following directly underneath. The uppermost meters proved to be a new challenge for the rotary technique since we specifically asked not to use any additives or stabilizers as it is customary in this kind of drilling. It took almost two days to reach a depth of 45 meters and finally, on Monday February 14^th, we resumed the drilling activity with sample recovery. From there it took only two days to reach the target depth of 100 meters, which marked the official end of the drilling operation in the Paranal claypan. It was a great success and the numbers speak for themselves: altogether, we recovered 185 core segments with a total length of more than 260 meters and almost 100 % core recovery in average.

It took us a whole day to prepare our valuable freight for its long way to Germany. All the cores and bag samples were organized in a total of 19 pallets that were loaded in a big truck from the drilling company Superex and in our pickup trucks, finally finishing with the last rays of sun. On Thursday February 17^th we drove out of the claypan and brought all our precious samples to a shipping agency located in the north of Antofagasta, from where they will start their journey to Cologne. We are all looking forward to seeing them again soon back home!