Tuesday, December 13, 2011

50 years scientific ocean drilling


In 1961 scientist tried to drill the mantle of the Earth with Project MoHole. Although it failed, it was the start of many decades of international collaboration in scientific ocean drilling.
For over 50 years the science community is gaining knowledge on System Earth by recovering sediments from Ocean floors all over the world.

From Wired

This week’s Seafloor Sunday is a short teaser video for an upcoming documentary about scientific drilling in the deep sea focused on the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) and its legacy programs — the Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) from 1983-2003 and the original Deep-Sea Drilling Program (DSDP) from 1966-1983.

Drilling into and acquiring core samples of marine sediments and oceanic crust has had an enormous impact on our understanding of the Earth.

Marine sediments are the most complete record we have of climatic and oceanographic change from timescales of thousands of years to tens of millions of years.

One of the important aspects of IODP is the archival of the cores for the scientific community use.

That is, even if you don’t directly participate in the cruise you can visit one of the core repositories to view and sample the cores to help answer scientific questions you are interested in.

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