Almost at the end of the season! In the ninth episode of Into the Core, we talk with Simona Pierdominici, a member of the ICDP Operational Support Group hosted at GFZ in Germany. She is an expert in borehole logging and has participated in several projects of the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP).

In this episode, our team asks Simona about her field experiences and her beginnings within ICDP projects. Can you imagine celebrating a birthday party in Antarctica or getting lost in the endless white landscape surrounded only by ice?

Turn up the volume and enjoy these stories and much more in this new episode of Into the Core.

Hosts: Rodrigo Martínez-Abarca and Romina Achaga
Guest: Simona Pierdominici

Into the Core is supported by the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) and is an initiative of the Early Career Researchers Network. Original idea by Marta Marchegiano.

Copyright-free background music, 2026.

In the eighth episode of Into the Core, we talk with Arne Ulfers, a researcher at the LIAG – Institute for Applied Geophysics in Germany. He is an expert in borehole logging, with experience in several projects of the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP).

In this episode, Arne explains how these techniques help us identify and characterize the sediments and rocks beneath a region, allowing scientists to better understand their properties and geometry for a wide range of applications.

We also hear memorable field stories, from his arrival in Antarctica as part of the SWAIS2C project to the time he found himself caught in the middle of a storm on Lake Nam Co (Tibetan Plateau), more than 30 km from the shore and at over 4,700 meters above sea level.

Curious to know how he made it through? Join us to find out.

Host: Rodrigo Martínez-Abarca
Guest: Arne Ulfers

Into the Core is supported by the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) and is an initiative of the Early Career Researchers Network. Original idea by Marta Marchegiano.

Copyright-free background music, 2026.

The Into the Core team returns once again to the IPA-IAL conference in Aix-les-Bains for this seventh episode, where we sit down with Maarten Van Daele.

In this episode, we explore how sediments can be key to understanding past events such as paleotsunamis and paleoearthquakes. We also talk about Maarten’s experience during the ICDP Lake Challa drilling campaign and share some memorable field stories — including the time he and his team lost the platform’s floats while drilling a lake in Chile.

Curious to know how they solved it? Join us to find out.

Maarten Van Daele is an associate professor at Ghent University in Belgium, specializing in sedimentology, geohazards, and limnogeology. His research focuses on lake and marine sediment archives, particularly turbidites as records of past earthquakes, tsunamis, and other extreme events. He is involved in ICDP projects such as DeepCHALLA. In addition, he has worked on unique sites like Iceberg Lake in Alaska, which drained in 1999 through an outburst flood, exposing sedimentary deposits that allow the study of historical earthquakes and other past events in outcrops.

Host: Rodrigo Martínez-Abarca
Guest: Maarten Van Daele
Edition: Romina Achaga

Into the Core is supported by the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) and is an initiative of the Early Career Researchers Network. Original idea by Marta Marchegiano.

Copyright-free background music, 2026.