Latest Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Stories
Alan McStravick for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online As we are quickly approaching the two-year anniversary of the Tohoku-Oki earthquake that prompted the devastating Honshu tsunami, we learned this week about a rapid-response drilling operation at the site of the earthquake. The March 2011 earthquake, a magnitude 9.0 temblor, was responsible for producing a 164-foot-tall slip along the fault. This is the single largest slip ever recorded in an earthquake. Needless to say, such a...
Michael Harper for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This fact holds true in a myriad of situations from physics to our global climate. Numerous studies have shown even the smallest change in an ecosystem can affect seemingly unrelated aspects to the same area. Today, German researchers along with researchers from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts have published a study detailing how global ice affects...
Michael Harper for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online The Mars Curiosity rover is sending data and pictures to Earth from Mars every day with only a 14 minute delay, a monumental feat of human accomplishment. Yet, for all our research into the stars, there remains a great deal of discovery to be had here on Earth, particularly below the surface. Now, a global team of drillers, geologists and other scientists and researchers plan to spend $1 billion to go the other way, deep into the...
Scientific deep sea drilling vessel Chikyu sets a world new record by drilling down and obtains rock samples from deeper than 2,111 meters below the seafloor off Shimokita Peninsula of Japan in the northwest Pacific Ocean. The Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), the implementing organization for scientific expedition aboard the Chikyu, announced this achievement on 6th September, 2012. Chikyu made this achievement during the Deep Coalbed Biosphere expedition,...
Dissolution or creation of huge gypsum deposits changed sulfate content of the oceans Scientists have discovered a potential cause of Earth's "icehouse climate" cooling trend of the past 45 million years. It has everything to do with the chemistry of the world's oceans. "Seawater chemistry is characterized by long phases of stability, which are interrupted by short intervals of rapid change," says geoscientist Ulrich Wortmann of the University of Toronto, lead author of a paper...
International scientists have shown that a dramatic sea-level rise occurred at the onset of the first warm period of the last deglaciation, known as the Bølling warming, approximately 14,600 years ago. This event, referred to as Melt-Water Pulse 1A (MWP-1A), corresponds to a rapid collapse of massive ice sheets 14,600 years ago and resulted in global sea-level rise of ~14 m. These findings are published in the 29 March 2012 issue of the journal Nature (Volume 483, Issue 7391)....
Scientists have recently finalized an expedition in an effort to learn more about an undersea mountain they say may have formed in a very different way than the rest of the seafloor. Aboard the JOIDES (Joint Oceanographic Institutions for Deep Earth Sampling) research ship, these scientists studied the formations and makeup of Atlantis Massif. This undersea mountain has been found to be made up of rocks typically found much deeper in the oceans crust. Other volcanic seamounts are usually...
Underwater river of mud and sand tells tale of climate change and ocean gateways, new oil and gas exploration possibilities Mediterranean bottom currents and the sediment deposits they leave behind offer new insights into global climate change, the opening and closing of ocean circulation gateways and locations where hydrocarbon deposits may lie buried under the sea. A team of 35 scientists from 14 countries recently returned from an expedition off the southwest coast of Iberia and the...
To find answers, oceanographers install observatories beneath remote seafloor Of all the habitable parts of our planet, one ecosystem still remains largely unexplored and unknown to science: the igneous ocean crust. This rocky realm of hard volcanic lava exists beneath ocean sediments that lie at the bottom of much of the world's oceans. While scientists have estimated that microbes living in deep ocean sediments may represent as much as one-third of Earth's total biomass, the...
Unleash your inner explorer and accompany USC geobiologist Katrina Edwards as she embarks on an ocean adventure this month — by reading her blog. The blog’s first post can be found online at the Scientific American website at http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/expeditions/2011/08/30/introducing-expedition-336-at-north-pond/. Edwards and her colleague Wolfgang Bach of Bremen University will co-lead a team of more than 100 scientists and support crew for the Center for Dark Energy...
