The Original Big Science
Science at sea has a rich pedigree. Modern "big science" itself began there, by my reckoning, in 1699. That's when Edmond Halley sailed HMS Paramore to the South Atlantic to survey the behavior of the magnetic compass for navigational purposes. It was the first voyage ever conducted purely for science, a project as significant in terms of the national budget and strategic interests as a major space flight is today.
Later scientific cruises made major breakthroughs. HMS Beagle's world cruise beginning in 1832 launched the career of Charles Darwin; the Wilkes expedition of 1837, which charted the Pacific islands and Antarctica under U.S. Navy auspices, launched that of James Dwight Dana. In the 1950s and 1960s two rival academic institutions, Lamont Geological Observatory in New York and Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California, surveyed the world's ocean floor and helped bring on the revolution of plate tectonics.
Then the major U.S. oceanography institutions joined forces and started an ambitious program to study the rocks beneath the whole world's seafloor, the hidden 70 percent of Earth's surface.
Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP)
In 1964 the consortium laid plans for geologic mapping of the global seafloor through deep-water core drilling. By 1968 the Joint Oceanographic Institutions for Deep Earth Sampling (JOIDES ) had secured long-term funding from the National Science Foundation and leased a custom drillship from Global Marine Development Inc. named GLOMAR Challenger. Using powerful thrusters to stay in one spot even in heavy seas, the ship could lower a drill string through 7 kilometers of water, then drill 1700 meters and more into the sediment and rock of the seabed. For the next 15 years the Challenger crisscrossed the seas, making 96 separate voyages or "legs" and drilling at 624 sites on the seafloor. During that time five other nations joined the program.
Ocean Drilling Program (ODP)
The Challenger was retired in 1983, and for the succeeding Ocean Drilling Program JOIDES, again with NSF funding, converted a more advanced drillship from industrial use and rechristened it JOIDES Resolution. From 1985 to 2003 this vessel traveled almost nonstop around the world drilling 650 more holes on 110 more legs. By ODP's end the program included more than 20 nations.
Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP)
The IODP is a truly international program, involving two ships. Japan built a heavy-duty drillship, Chikyu (Earth), to conduct deep crustal drilling in the high-energy zones where lithospheric plates meet and create earthquakes. That began in 2007. The Joint Oceanographic Institutions (JOI) consortium has upgraded JOIDES Resolution to carry on, concentrating on sediment drilling for climate-related studies and special studies of the deep subsea biosphere. That program resumed in 2007.
IODP has an educational arm, the Deep Earth Academy, that brings ocean drilling into classrooms and communities by giving teachers data and lesson plans. It also gives scientists new ways to share their passion—deep-sea mud—with people who might not otherwise understand its fascination and meaning.
The initial term of IODP is ten years, but such a good thing surely will not stop then—probably not in our lifetimes.
PS: GLOMAR Challenger has what you might call an evil twin, GLOMAR Explorer. It was built for a top-secret CIA mission to raise a sunken Russian submarine from the deep Pacific. After that, the Explorer was refitted in 1997 into an innocent oil drillship and still is at work. The Challenger was scrapped, but parts of the history-making ship remain with the Smithsonian Institute.
