Latest Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Stories

Researchers aboard drilling vessel Chikyu report successful completion of first riser-drilling operations in earthquake zone.Kumano Basin off Kii Peninsula, approximately 58 km southeast of Japan"” Despite harsh weather and ocean conditions, and complex geological characteristics of its drill site, the deep-sea drilling vessel CHIKYU, for the first time in the history of scientific ocean drilling, conducted riser-drilling operations to drill successfully down to a depth of 1,603.7 meters...

Drillship JOIDES Resolution completes first expedition as redesigned shipThe Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) drillship JOIDES Resolution is returning to port in Honolulu this week after a two-month voyage to chart detailed climate history in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. The expedition was the first of two back-to-back voyages of a scientific project called Pacific Equatorial Age Transect (PEAT). It was the first international scientific drilling expedition after the JOIDES...

The drillship JOIDES Resolution ("JR") has returned to international operations, and will make a port call in Honolulu, Hawaii, May 5-9, 2009.When it arrives, an international team of scientists studying seafloor sediments will have completed the first of two nine-week Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) expeditions to the equatorial Pacific Ocean.After more than two years of rebuilding, the JR has new capabilities that include an upgraded sub-sea camera system, improved core...

A team of Yale geologists has a new perspective on the greenhouse-to-icehouse shift where global climate changed from an ice-free world to one with massive ice sheets in the Antarctic nearly 34 million years ago.The study, which is detailed in the February issue of Science, disproves a long-held theory that massive ice growth was accompanied by very little global temperature change.According to the report, there was an estimated 18°F drop in latitude temperatures, and nearly as great a...

Priceless treasure from the bottom of the sea is locked away at Texas A&M University, stacked on floor-to-ceiling racks and kept secure in 15,000 square feet of refrigerated space. Although it's not gold bullion or precious gems, this treasure dazzles oceanographers, geologists, geophysicists and other geoscientists who come from around the world to College Station to sample it. One piece is even on permanent display at the Smithsonian.The treasure is a library of more than 106 kilometers...

Cooperative agreements signed with teams from the University of Wisconsin, Dartmouth College, University of New Hampshire are vital to climate studiesThe National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Office of Polar Programs (OPP) announced today the signing of cooperative agreements, one with a university collaboration comprising Dartmouth College, the University of New Hampshire, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the other with the University of Wisconsin-Madison alone, that together...

Biogeoscientists show evidence of 90 billion tons of microbial organisms"”expressed in terms of carbon mass"”living in the deep biosphere, in a research article published online by Nature, July 20, 2008. This tonnage corresponds to about one-tenth of the amount of carbon stored globally in tropical rainforests. The authors: Kai-Uwe Hinrichs and Julius Lipp of the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM) at University of Bremen, Germany; and Fumio Inagaki and Yuki Morono of the...

Cores provide new data source on how earthquakes are generatedThe third expedition of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program's Nankai Trough Seismogenic Zone Experiment (NanTroSEIZE) completed its mission off the Kii Peninsula today. The expedition science party, 26 scientists representing 10 countries, set forth on Dec. 19, 2007, aboard the drilling vessel Chikyu, to evaluate the deformation, structural partitioning, and physical characteristics of the Nankai Trough fault zone. The expedition...

Rice's Sawyer, colleagues search Nankai Trough for quake cluesRice University Earth scientist Dale Sawyer and colleagues last month reported the discovery of a strong variation in the tectonic stresses in a region of the Pacific Ocean notorious for generating devastating earthquakes and tsunamis in southeastern Japan.The results came from an eight-week expedition by Sawyer and 15 scientists from six countries at the Nankai Trough, about 100 miles from Kobe, Japan. Using the new scientific...

COLLEGE STATION, Texas -- The small gray and black rocks stored in 3-foot-long clear plastic tubes at a Texas A&M University lab could be mistaken for the leftovers after a kitchen countertop installation.But the surprisingly heavy pebbles are much more significant. They're part of the only intact section of oceanic crust ever recovered, pulled from beneath the Pacific Ocean by geologists drilling more than a mile into the sea floor.Scientists hope this latest effort in the...