Legacy Programs
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.
| Deep Ocean Explorer: Glomar Challenger | |
|---|---|
| Total distance penetrated below sea floor | 325,548 m |
| Total interval cored | 170,043 m |
| Total core recovered and stored | 97,056 m |
| Overall core recovery | 57% |
| Number of core samples recovered | 19,119 |
| Number of sites investigated | 624 |
| Deepest penetration into basaltic ocean crust | 1,714 m |
| Maximum penetration into basaltic ocean crust | 1,350 m |
| Deepest water (Leg 60, Site 461A) | 7,044 m |
| Total distance traveled (nautical miles) | 375,632 |
In June 1970, the "Challenger's" DSDP engineers devised a way to replace worn drill bits and then re-enter boreholes for deeper drilling while in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of New York, in 10,000 feet (3,048 meters) of water. This required the use of sonar scanning equipment and a large-scale re-entry cone.
Process-oriented Earth studies continued from 1985 until 2003 aboard the JOIDES Resolution, which replaced the Glomar Challenger in January 1985 as DSDP morphed into the Ocean Drilling Program (ODP). The JOIDES Resolution is named for the 200-year-old HMS Resolution which explored the Pacific Ocean and Antarctica under the command of Captain James Cook.
The Ocean Drilling Program contributed significantly to increased scientific understanding of Earth history, climate change, plate tectonics, natural resources, and geohazards. ODP discoveries include validation of:
- fluids circulating through the ocean floor;
- the formation of gigantic volcanic plateaus at phenomenal rates unknown today;
- natural methane frozen deep within marine sediments as gas hydrate;
- a microbial community living deep within oceanic crust;
- climate change cycles
Read more about this topic: Integrated Ocean Drilling Program
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