What is Scientific Ocean Drilling?
Science-based knowledge of Planet Earth is of fundamental importance to support a modern resilient society facing the global challenges posed by climate change, natural hazards, the energy transition, and the needs of a safe and sustainable blue economy.
The equilibrium between Earth, human society, and ecosystems can often only be achieved by considering Earth as a system in which the understanding of Earth history, Earth dynamics, and the deep Earth biosphere are used to shape a better future for the planet.
Scientific drilling has supported the science-based knowledge of Earth systems since the 1960s through a continued and coordinated series of international programmes that together represent the largest and longest-living initiative of international scientific collaboration in the Earth Sciences.
Pankaj Khanna and Christina Ravelo examine a core in the science container. Credit: M. Parker, © ECORD/IODP
In the ocean realm, representing about 70% of Earth’s surface, scientific drilling has allowed the scientific community to access some of Earth’s most challenging environments, collecting data and samples of sediments, rocks, geo-fluids, living organisms and monitoring data from below the seafloor. This outstanding achievement has been facilitated by a unique collaboration between engineers, technicians, scientists, and managers, working with a common purpose.
In over 50 years of existence, scientific ocean drilling has:
- Recovered more than 490 km of cores.
- Retrieved geological archives and geophysical data that have yielded insight into first-order questions about how our planet works.
- Resulted in the confirmation of the unifying theory of plate tectonics and the development of new fields (palaeoceanography, astronomical geochronology, structure and geodynamics of the ocean crust, geo-resources in oceanic hydrothermal systems, marine gas-hydrate reservoirs, geomicrobiology).
- Installed long-term borehole observatories at critical sites that allow the biogeochemical exchanges between rocks, fluids and life to be monitored in real time.
- Further developed drilling techniques and concepts including multiple hole drilling and transect approaches that made complete and high-resolution sections possible for the first time.
- Provided access to the subseafloor to various scientific communities.
- Involved more than 5,000 scientific participants from around the globe.
- Produced more than 11,000 peer-reviewed publications, of which more than 500 appeared in the leading Nature and Science journals.
- Trained successive generations of multidisciplinary geoscientists.