Sadly, the JOIDES Resolution, also known as the JR, may have sailed for the last time. On August 2, 2024, it docked in Amsterdam, with no clear path to raising the $72 million per year needed to keep the ship afloat. The majority of this funding comes from the U.S. National Science Foundation, which announced in 2023 that it would not fund the JR after 2024 because contributions from international partners were not keeping up with rising costs. Crews have begun removing scientific equipment from the ship.
The National Science Foundation says it will support ongoing research using existing core samples and work with scientists to plan the future of scientific ocean drilling. But for me and many other scientists, the cost of operating the JR is nothing compared to the damage caused by a single major earthquake — such as Japan’s 2011 Tohuku-Oki earthquake, which was estimated at $220 billion — or the trillions of dollars in damage from climate change. Ocean core research helps scientists understand events like these so that societies can plan for the future.
A floating laboratory
No other ship has the capabilities of the JR. The ship is 469 feet (143 meters) long – 50% longer than a football field. It has more than 5 miles (8 kilometers) of drill pipe connecting the ship to the seafloor and the strata below, allowing it to bring core samples from the subsea to the ship.
The JR’s dynamic positioning system allows it to stay in one spot for days or weeks at a time. Only two other ships in the world have this capability: the Chikyu, a larger ship operated by Japan in Japanese waters, and a new Chinese drill ship called the Mengxiang.
I have been on eight two-month expeditions on the JOIDES Resolution, mostly at high latitudes near the poles to explore past climates. Each voyage was manned by about 60 scientists and engineers and 65 crew members. Once the ship left port, operations continued 24 hours a day, every day. We all worked 12-hour shifts.
These journeys could be grueling. But more often than not, it was the excitement of new and often unexpected discoveries, and the camaraderie of fellow participants, that sped up the time.
Insights from JR Expeditions
As early as the 1960s, geologists began to understand that Earth’s continents and oceans were not static. Instead, they were part of moving plates in the Earth’s crust and upper mantle. Movement of the plates, especially where they collide, causes earthquakes and volcanoes.
Cores of marine sediments can penetrate a mile or more into the Earth’s crust. They offer the only way to investigate ongoing changes in tectonic plate interactions, study ocean climate and evolution, and explore the limits of life on Earth. Here are four areas where details of these processes have begun to emerge:
Creation of tectonic plates
Oceanic crust is fundamentally different from the crust that underlies the continents. When I first heard about it in the 1970s, the model for its formation and structure was simple:
– Lava rose from magma chambers beneath chains of volcanoes on the sea floor, known as mid-ocean ridges.
– It flowed to the sea floor, forming a dark, often glassy, volcanic rock called basalt.
– In the deeper, slowly cooling magma chamber, crystalline minerals formed, creating rocks with a texture similar to granite.
– Over millions of years, this new crust moved away from the ridges, becoming cooler and denser.
But cores retrieved by the JOIDES Resolution, together with studies using underwater robots, so-called submersibles, showed that this view was wrong. For example, they showed that seawater circulates through the crust, changing the composition and chemistry of the seawater itself.
Core studies also showed that Earth’s mantle—a foundation thought to lie deep beneath the surface—moves along giant, previously unknown fault zones and extends to the surface of the ocean crust. The mantle could provide clues to the origins of life.
These insights changed scientists’ fundamental understanding of the structure of our planet.
Climate records in the ocean crust
My particular interest is in sediments that accumulate on the ocean crust. These deposits contain tiny microfossils of plankton, including organisms such as diatoms and coccolithophores that live at or near the ocean surface. During photosynthesis, they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and produce half of all the oxygen we breathe.
Plankton species vary with the temperature and chemistry of seawater. When they die and fall to the seafloor, they preserve an excellent record of past climates. Scientists use them to understand how the Earth’s climate has warmed and cooled in the past.
Another source of information is sediments that fall from melting icebergs. Glaciers pick up rocks as they flow over land. When they reach the sea, parts of them break off and become icebergs. The ice melts when exposed to warmer ocean waters and the rocks fall to the sea floor. These rock deposits in sediments are a record of past transitions between warm and cold climates.
Record destruction and recycling
Most of the Pacific Ocean and some regions of the Atlantic Ocean lie above zones called convergent margins, where tectonic plates grind against each other. This process forces some of the ocean crust and sediment down into the Earth, where it melts and is eventually recycled into new crust, often as volcanoes.
Large faults along these edges can produce massive earthquakes, such as the 2011 Tohoku-Oki earthquake off the east coast of Japan. Cores taken near such faults help scientists understand the forces that drive these events. They also create openings where instruments can be placed to monitor future earthquakes.
Core drillings taken from convergent margins also reveal how volcanoes form and how they affect long-term climate change by emitting carbon dioxide.
The limits of earthly life
In the late 1970s, exotic new forms of terrestrial life were discovered in the Pacific Ocean, in zones where ocean crust was forming. At plate boundaries, cold seawater seeped down through cracks in the crust. There it was reheated by hot magma and spewed upward through vents that scientists called hydrothermal vents.
The hot water contained minerals, which cooled when they hit the cold seawater and hardened into chimney-like structures around the openings. Hundreds of life forms, including microbes, mussels and tube worms, colonized these structures and thrived near zones of intense pressure and temperatures as high as 248 degrees Fahrenheit (120 degrees Celsius).
JR cores have subsequently revealed other life forms surviving deep in the ocean’s subsurface, in conditions of extreme oxygen and energy shortages. Scientists know almost nothing about the diversity of these organisms, or the metabolic strategies they use to survive in their challenging environments. Understanding how they thrive could inform missions to other planets, such as Saturn’s moon Enceladus and Jupiter’s moon Europa, which have subsurface oceans that could support life.
What is the future of scientific ocean drilling?
The National Science Foundation has established a committee to evaluate the capabilities of a new drill ship. Congress may appropriate funding for additional JR expeditions in 2025. Given how much scientists still don’t know about Earth’s history and the challenges humanity faces in adapting to climate change, my colleagues and I hope that the JOIDES resolution can still sail and that a new ship will eventually begin its mission.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit organization that brings you facts and analysis to help you understand our complex world.
It was written by: Suzanne O’Connell, Wesleyan University.
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Suzanne O’Connell is not an employee of, an advisor to, an owner of stock in, or a recipient of funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond her academic appointment.