With 800 meters of core, everyone finds something they like.”Īlthough most of the analysis begins months after the expedition, when core samples are parceled out to team members, “you can walk off the ship with a lot of data,” Lang said. “You can walk off the ship with a lot of data. The mission extended an existing borehole to a depth of about 2,000 meters and drilled a shallower one at a second location to provide insights into the chemistry that could have given rise to microbial life in the region.

Lang, an associate scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who earlier this year was co–science leader of Expedition 399, “ Building Blocks of Life.” The ship journeyed to the Atlantis Massif, a region that’s home to a large hydrothermal vent field at the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. “It’s possible to do a lot of analyses at sea,” said Susan Q. JR is equipped with labs that allow mission scientists to examine and process the cores, take thin slices for microscopic analysis, and conduct other experiments. “I was part of the night shift, or sunrise shift, and my favorite time of day was to have my lunch on deck watching the Sun come up, before the majority of the ship woke up and swung into action,” she said. “The JOIDES has honed and fine-tuned the ability to recover pristine core material in immensely complex environments, such as deep-sea locations, or to efficiently handle high core recovery,” said Anna Joy Drury, a research fellow at University College London, who is studying the history of Earth’s oceans and climate during the Mesozoic and Cenozoic periods.ĭrury sailed on Expedition 363, in 2016, to the Western Pacific Warm Pool in the Indian and Pacific oceans. Credit: Kelly Eric Bravo, IODP JRSO, CC BY 4.0 Technicians work on the JR’s drilling rig. It can operate in waters up to almost 6 kilometers deep and drill cores up to 2 kilometers long, which can record hundreds of millions of years of Earth’s history. In the 4 decades since, the 143-meter ship has conducted research in every ocean, from the Arctic to the Antarctic. JOIDES (pronounced JOY-deez) Resolution, which is a modified commercial oil exploration platform, made its first scientific expedition for NSF in January 1985. It’s not a tremendous amount of money, and the return on investment in the science is huge.” A Geology Department at Sea “To quote an old saying, it’s penny-wise and pound-foolish. “Pulling the plug without a plan for the future cuts us off at the knees,” said Beth Christensen, who chairs the Department of Environmental Science at Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J. In the town hall, McManus said that it’s up to the scientists to tell the agency what they want and need. It has no plans to build or acquire a replacement ship, and although the agency said it supports the idea of paying to lease drilling platforms for specific projects, it hasn’t produced any specifics on how much it can spend on those efforts or when they might begin. Some scientists, however, have complained that NSF hasn’t prepared for any real transition. “It’s imperative that we start planning for the next phase of scientific ocean drilling now, because any plans will take time to fully realize.” scientific ocean drilling lacks international support, so we need a new model,” said James McManus, director of NSF’s Division of Ocean Sciences, during a 6 July 2023 virtual town hall meeting.

“It’s clear to us that the current model of U.S. The agency said a budget crunch, the end of an international agreement, and the pending expiration of the ship’s current environmental impact statement left NSF with little choice. The National Science Foundation (NSF), which funds scientific ocean drilling, announced in March 2023 that JOIDES ( Joint Oceanographic Institutions for Deep Earth Sampling) Resolution ( JR) will retire in September 2024. The awesome experiences are about to come to an end. “The whole thing was like science camp, and that was awesome,” he said. The people he worked with “became like a family,” celebrating the holidays with Christmas carols and a New Year’s dance party and marking Thirumalai’s birthday by wearing false mustaches to match his impressive ‘stache. Kaustubh Thirumalai, then a graduate student, holds a crushed core liner during JR Expedition 353, in 2014.

Sunset colorful ocean waves