Drill samples collected by the Joides Resolution from beneath the ocean floor provide valuable data that cannot be obtained any other way. Photograph: Thomas Ronge/IODP
‘A huge loss’: is it the end for the ship that helped us understand life on Earth?
The
Joides Resolution has contributed to our understanding of climate
crisis, the origin of life, earthquakes and eruptions. But funding cuts
mean it may have sailed its last expedition
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In
the early summer of this year, a ship set sail around the Norwegian
archipelago of Svalbard. But this wasn’t any ordinary ship. For almost
40 years the Joides Resolution drilled into the ocean floor to
collect samples and data that helped scientists to study Earth’s history
and structure. Expeditions on the vessel have made a vital contribution
to our understanding of the climate crisis, the tectonic plates theory,
the origin of life on Earth and natural hazards such as earthquakes and
eruptions. Yet the two-month voyage around Svalbard was to be its last.
The
National Science Foundation (NSF), the US agency that provided
scientists at Texas A&M University with funds for the ship,
announced last year it would not
give money for the drilling vessel past September 2024. It was a
declaration that shocked the global scientific community and meant that
Svalbard would be the ship’s final outing.
“Being deprived
of this workhorse is devastating because we can’t get these data in any
other way,” says Thomas Ronge, the project manager of the Svalbard
expedition. “We are losing our potential to read the history book of
climate change.”
To understand the
significance of the loss of the drilling vessel, it is useful to look at
the evolution of this type of exploration and what it has attempted to
achieve – in many cases successfully.
It began
in earnest in the early 1960s, when a group of scientists embarked on a
mission to drill down from a floating barge, called Cuss I, to the
border between the crust, the Earth’s outermost layer, and the mantle,
the next and thickest layer. Project Mohole, as it was known, was
recorded by the novelist and amateur oceanographer John Steinbeck in an article for Life magazine.
“This is the opening move in a long-term plan of exploration of the
unknown two-thirds of our planet that lies under the sea,” he wrote. “We
know less about this area than we do about the moon.”
![Black and white photo of a drill barge in the ocean]()
That mission
was ultimately unsuccessful but it laid the foundations for scientific
ocean drilling, the concept of which is simple. Strata of sediments
accumulate underwater, eventually becoming rock under pressure. Unlike
on land, where disparate factors change the ground conformation in
unpredictable ways, layers on the sea floor usually pile up at a regular
pace and remain untouched. The deeper you drill, the further back in
time you can go.
After the failure of Mohole
came the drill ship Glomar Challenger and, from 1985, the Joides
Resolution. As recently as last year, 62 years after the Mohole project
recounted by Steinbeck, scientists aboard the Joides managed to extract rock samples from the Earth’s mantle for the first time. “We did it,” said one of the expedition members to the New York Times.
“We now have a treasure trove of rocks that will let us systematically
study the processes that people believe are relevant to the emergence of
life on the planet.”
Yet such discoveries, at least using a US-funded vessel, appear unlikely in the near future.
“[The
end of the funding] is a huge loss to science and to everyone,” says
Adriane Lam, a researcher at Binghamton University in New York, who was
aboard the Joides this summer for the ship’s last expedition.
“The stuff we’re finding has huge implications for things like where
people live and may not be able to live in the future if the Earth keeps
warming up.”
We lose the ship, which is already a big blow. But the worst part is losing the expertise
Thomas RongeOn its last expedition, the Joides drilled into the sea floor to help scientists understand how an ice sheet in the Arctic
Ocean collapsed thousands of years ago. Analysing how the Svalbard ice
sheet melted, researchers hope to be able to model the possible collapse
of a vulnerable equivalent in the west Antarctic.
The
NSF attributed its decision to end its funding to rising costs and a
lack of financial support from the International Ocean Discovery
Program’s partners. But many see the expenditure for the ship as paltry
compared with its benefits. To put it in perspective, the total NSF
budget for 2023 was close to $10bn (£7.5bn); the $71m spent on the
Joides is 0.7% of that.
The loss
of the Joides also opens up opportunities for other countries to get
ahead in the race for discovery. Some of the Joides’ crew have already
been contacted by what may be the next protagonist of scientific ocean
drilling: China. In December last year, Beijing launched its first
drilling vessel, the Mengxiang, a super-advanced ship that will most
probably take over the field.
“People were
shocked and caught out off guard when NSF made that announcement,” says
Suzanne O’Connell, a professor of earth and environmental sciences at
Wesleyan University in Connecticut. “In a way, the fact that the Chinese
have built their vessel could help spur us to build a new one.”
O’Connell did
two expeditions with the Glomar Challenger and eight on the Joides. She
is now appealing to US members of Congress and the media to try to
salvage the ship.
One slender hope remains for
the Joides to avoid the scrapyard. A bill proposed to the House in July
asked the NSF to use $60m to continue operating the vessel for
at least three missions next year. According to a spokesperson for the
congressman Michael McCaul – the Republican representative for Texas
A&M University’s district who is pushing for the extra funding –
the chances of the bill passing are “high”. However, it probably will
not be voted on until mid-December at the earliest and its final text is
anything but definitive.
-
A scan of the last core retrieved by the Joides in front of
Svalbard on 26 July 2024. After having drilled about 373,000 meters of
sediments and rocks in almost 40 years of missions, these are the last
4.46 meters of sediments extracted. Photograph: Expedition 403 Science
Party
In the
meantime, the equipment belonging to Texas A&M is being taken off
the ship and the crew are likely to move to new jobs. It is not clear if
there would be time to make the Joides operational again at that point,
and James McManus, the NSF’s director of ocean sciences, says he
“cannot speculate on this scenario”.
With
no guarantees for the future, several drilling projects have been
postponed indefinitely, and an entire branch of science risks stalling,
at least in the west.
“We lose the ship, which
is already a big blow,” says Ronge, now in Texas working on the cores
from the last expedition. “But the worst part is losing the expertise,
because if the people that can now run the ship blindfolded will find
other jobs or retire, their knowledge will be gone. And without them it
will take a decade before we return to full capacity.”