What is Scientific Ocean Drilling?

 

A Brief Overview of Scientific Ocean Drilling

Ship on the ocean
An aerial view of the starboard side of the scientific ocean drilling vessel JOIDES Resolution on a beautiful sunny day in the Ross Sea, Antarctica. (Credit: William Crawford, IODP JRSO, MerlinOne Archive CC BY 4.0)

Scientific ocean drilling is a way to study the Earth by drilling into the ocean floor to collect samples of sediment, rock, and fluids beneath the seabed. These samples are called cores (and you can see the ship’s crew pulling out a plastic liner filled with a core in the image below) and they reveal a record of Earth’s history, including changes in climate, ocean circulation, tectonic activity, and life over millions of years. A scientific drilling vessel or platform collects material through drilling rather than just breaking apart the seafloor so that a continuous record of material can be retrieved.

group of crew members surrounding a plastic tube filled with rocks.
Siem personnel on the rig floor pulling a core liner out of the core barrel before it is handed to the JRSO technicians on the core receiving platform. (Credit: Sandra Herrmann, IODP JRSO, MerlinOne Archive CC BY 4.0)

 

Scientific ocean drilling expeditions act as points for multiple disciplines across ocean science to obtain as much material as they can to answer questions relating to specific research objectives. This provides multiple areas of scientific investigations for each expedition.

group of people standing next to and pointing at rock on table.
From left, William Brazelton (Microbiologist, University of Utah, USA), Carel Lewis (Curatorial Specialist, IODP JRSO), Barbara John (Structural Geologist, University of Wyoming, USA), Andrew Parsons (Structural Geologist, University of Plymouth, UK), and Susan Lang (Co-Chief Scientist, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, USA) discuss which piece of core will be taken for microbiological subsampling and analysis. (Credit: Erick Bravo, IODP JRSO, MerlinOne CC BY 4.0)

 

The different types of samples that scientists can collect from the cores and subsurface vary, depending upon how their research is defined. A scientist can directly sample small pieces of sediment or hard rock from a core for analysis. In addition to the geologic samples, scientist can collect samples of water from the seafloor, samples of the drilling mud standardize readings to the core material,  samples from the water trapped in the core, and more.

Photo 1: Clara Blättler (Inorganic Geochemist, University of Chicago, USA) prepares to process an interstitial water sample. Photo 2:  Sarah Feakins (Organic Geochemist, University of Southern California, USA) takes a gas sample through the core liner on the catwalk. Photo 3: Gordon Southam (Microbiologist, The University of Queensland, Australia) takes a sample of the material collected from the junk basket. Photo 4: Heike Zimmermann (Microbiologist/Observer, Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, Denmark), dressed to avoid contamination, takes a sample to be analyzed for sedimentary ancient DNA. (Credit for Photo 1: Danielle Noto & IODP; Credit Photos 3-4: Erick Bravo, IODP JRSO. All photos from MerlinOne Archive CC BY 4.0).

 

How Scientific Ocean Drilling differs from drilling for oil and gas

Throughout the past and present, scientific ocean drilling seeks to advance scientific knowledge by retrieving cores of ocean sediments and/or crustal material. The objectives of oil and gas drilling are different, focusing on the extraction of resources for economic purposes.

Though scientific ocean drilling may use similar technology to ships that drill for oil, scientific ocean drilling vessels do not have the instrumentation or capacity to drill and recover oil. The process of drilling to extract oil involves trying to drill as fast as the ship can to start oil collection. Scientific ocean drilling requires the drillers to proceed slowly so as not to negatively impact the volume and data integrity of the seafloor material they recover for the scientific objectives.

To ensure the scientific drilling and coring activities are not too close to oil and gas deposits in the deep sea, there is extensive survey work and a geophysical assessment completed in a proposed drilling location before an expedition even begins. The existence of subsurface oil and gas reservoirs would not only prevent the collection of cores and data useful for scientific knowledge, the potential of intersecting with a subsurface reservoir would generate a hazard for drilling.

During an expedition, the scientists continue to check the material they are drilling through to confirm there are no hidden pockets of oil or gas in the subsurface. The geochemists onboard will routinely take small samples from the retrieved cores to check for any detection of hydrocarbons. If hydrocarbons are present and increasing in concentration across cores, that signifies the drilling activity is getting close to some type of hydrocarbon deposit under pressure, and the drillers would immediately suspend drilling activity in that location.

man with goggles is bent over a long tube of sediment collecting a sample.
Yige Zhang (Organic Geochemist, Texas A&M University, USA) takes a headspace gas sample on the catwalk after the core is cut into sections. (Credit: William Crawford, IODP JRSO, MerlinOne Archive CC BY 4.0)

 

 

 

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Scientific Ocean Drilling: Exploration and Discovery through Time Copyright © 2025 by Laura Guertin; Elizabeth Doyle; and Tessa Peixoto is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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