International Conference to Plan Future of Ocean Drilling

9/9/09 - The future of scientific ocean drilling will be planned later this month in Bremen, Germany, when eleven faculty and scientists and four graduate students from Texas A&M University join an international assemblage of nearly 500 scientists at the INVEST conference – IODP New Ventures in Exploring Scientific Targets.

The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) is a world-wide research program coordinated by implementing organizations in the U.S., Japan, and Europe. Texas A&M University is home to the U.S. arm of IODP.

The U.S. Implementing Organization (USIO) consists of A&M, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University and the Consortium for Ocean Leadership. As the program’s science operator, Texas A&M, through the College of Geosciences, manages the 469-foot scientific ocean drill ship the JOIDES Resolution and the program’s U.S. core repository.

The JOIDES Resolution travels the world’s oceans on science expeditions that address a range of topics, from continental drift and the evolution of the planet to understanding climate and environmental changes of the last 100 million years.  The ship resumed expeditions in March after undergoing a $115 million renovation that made substantial improvements to its lab, computer and drilling capabilities.

Current funding for IODP will expire in 2013. The INVEST conference, being held September 23-25, is the first step in building the program plan and deciding priorities for the next funding cycle. Conference sponsors are the University of Bremen and IODP Management International, the program’s central management organization.

“This is where we will decide the science plan for the next phase of ocean drilling,” said IODP-TAMU Director Brad Clement. “The ocean drilling community at large will debate and set its research priorities for this phase.”

“This meeting is to show that there is worldwide interest – which the funding agencies need – but the meat of the thing is for these scientists to identify what the significant problems are that we have to work on,” said Oceanography Professor Mitch Lyle who coordinates A&M’s Ocean Drilling and Sustainable Earth Science (ODASES) program.

Lyle has been involved with ocean drilling for over 30 years, and he was co-chief scientist on an expedition last May/June that drilled in the equatorial Pacific. With 25 years experience in ocean drilling, Clement has sailed on four expeditions.

Both Clement and Lyle will attend INVEST along with five IODP-TAMU staff scientists and four ODASES faculty. IODP-TAMU is contributing posters on the improved analytical capabilities of the JOIDES Resolution and its improved drilling and coring capabilities.

On the ship’s last two expeditions, including the one led by Lyle, new records for piston core drilling were set, breaking one which had stood since 1992.

Clement noted that these new depth records are important because that type of coring brings the most pristine samples from the seafloor that can be used in very high resolution studies.

“Those record depths are basically double what we routinely drill to. If we can do that systematically, it will double the time scale over which we can look at high resolution climate change,” Clement said.

In looking ahead to the conference, both Clement and Lyle said that it is important for Texas A&M to have strong representation.

“We’re part of the whole process, and we can get our priorities in there and understand what other people’s priorities are,” Lyle said. “It will help to align what we are trying to do when we submit a re-bid so that we can best position our proposal.”

“We’ve heard through the Office of Science and Technology Policy that the Obama administration wants us to focus not on the successes of our past, but on how the science can help influence policy in the future, particularly related to climate, energy resources, and even health,” Clement said.

“This is all extremely relevant to our age,” he added. “One of the very first things the Earth climate record tells us is that the Earth has cooled and warmed before, so just because we overheat the planet doesn’t mean there isn’t a way that the planet could cool again. People get so upset about global warming, but the Earth has done this before. We can figure out those mechanisms by looking at how it happened. The answer is there; we just have to go find it.”

“Climate science is basically geographic,” said Lyle. “The only way we can get some sense of the magnitude of change we’re causing by adding CO2 to the atmosphere is to look at those times in the past where we had high CO2 worlds. Then we can see how the processes differ.”

While in Bremen, INVEST delegates will participate in working groups organized by research specialty. Clement said that after the conference, a team will be chosen to write the science plan for the next phase of ocean drilling.

“That will be a large scale proposal,” Clement said. “It’s the science objectives that outline the research priorities, and it’s the best thoughts on how to go about achieving those priorities. Based on that, funding decisions will be made.”

For more information on the INVEST conference, visit http://www.oceanleadership.org. To learn more about IODP, visit the program website at http://iodp.tamu.edu.