Integrated Ocean Drilling Program
| Established | 2003 |
|---|---|
|
Field of research
|
Geology |
| Website | www |
The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) was an international marine research program. The program used heavy drilling equipment mounted aboard ships to monitor and sample sub-seafloor environments. With this research, the IODP documented environmental change, Earth processes and effects, the biosphere, solid earth cycles, and geodynamics.
The program began a new 10-year phase with the International Ocean Discovery Program, from the end of 2013.
The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) brought together scientists from different countries and scientific disciplines to conduct investigations of the Earth deep below the sea-floor. IODP gave scientists the opportunity to:
IODP was conceived in 2003 as a 10-year Earth science and research program. IODP scientists were drawn from universities and institutes located all across its member countries. Two previous scientific ocean drilling programs, Deep Sea Drilling Project and Ocean Drilling Program, generated abundant information about Earth’s dynamic nature including tectonic processes, ocean circulation, climate change, continental rifting, and ocean basin formation. With IODP, scientific ocean drilling continued to provide scientists with in-situ studies of critical processes related to Earth’s short-term change and long-term variability. IODP provided diverse drilling resources to meet specific requirements of each planned drilling project.
IODP focused on ocean basins to study the interdependent processes with particular emphases on factors controlling climate change, the vast circulation of fluids within Earth’s crust, the nature of life on and within Earth, and the dynamics of tropospheric formation and recycling.
Scientific ocean drilling represented the longest running and most successful international collaboration among the Earth sciences. Scientific ocean drilling began in 1961 with the first sample of oceanic crust recovered aboard the CUSS 1, a modified U.S. Navy barge. American author John Steinbeck, also an amateur oceanographer, documented Project Mohole for LIFE Magazine.
The Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP), established in June 1966, operated the Glomar Challenger in drilling and coring operations in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, as well as in the Mediterranean and Red Seas. The Challenger’s coring operations enabled DSDP to provide the next intellectual step in verifying the hypothesis of plate tectonics associated with seafloor spreading, by dating basal sediments on transects away from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
...
Wikipedia