Scientific Ocean Drilling in the news

Researchers have identified a ‘tipping point’ about 2.7 million years ago when global climate conditions switched from being relatively warm and stable to cold and chaotic, as continental ice sheets expanded in the northern hemisphere. Following this transition, Earth’s climate began swinging back and forth between warm interglacial periods and frigid ice ages, linked to slow, cyclic changes in Earth’s orbit.

Around 56 million years ago, Europe and North America began pulling apart to form what became the ever-expanding North Atlantic Ocean. Vast amounts of molten rock from Earth’s mantle reached the ocean floor as the crust stretched and thinned, creating a volcanic rifted margin between Norway and Greenland, a marine feature that has intrigued scientists for decades.

Scientists for the first time have detected a slow slip earthquake releasing tectonic pressure on a major fault zone at the bottom of the ocean. The slow earthquake was recorded spreading along the tsunami-generating portion of a fault off the coast of Japan, behaving like a tectonic shock absorber.

A record-setting scientific drilling mission has uncovered a fragile clay layer beneath the Japan Trench that helps explain why the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake ruptured so close to the seafloor. That shallow rupture drove massive seafloor displacement and intensified the tsunami that followed. The findings, published in Science, offer new clarity on one of the most devastating natural disasters in modern history.

For the first time, a science team has directly documented and extensively sampled a freshened water system beneath the ocean floor off the coast of New England in the USA. This major discovery comes from the initial analyses of sediment cores recovered during the International Ocean Drilling Programme (IODP3) Expedition 501, led by Co-Chief Scientists Professor Brandon Dugan (Colorado School of Mines, Golden, USA) and Professor Rebecca Robinson (Graduate School of Oceanography, University of Rhode Island, USA.

Deep beneath our feet, a restless ocean of molten metal helps keep Earth livable. The planet’s magnetic field forms as liquid iron and nickel circulate through the outer core, generating electric currents that create a global magnetic shield. That shield is powerful, but it is not permanently locked in place.

For the first time, a science team directly documented and extensively sampled a freshened water system beneath the ocean floor. This major discovery comes from the initial analyses of sediment cores recovered during an international scientific expedition led by Co-Chief Scientists Professor Brandon Dugan (Colorado School of Mines, Golden, USA) and Professor Rebecca Robinson (Graduate School of Oceanography, University of Rhode Island, USA).

Earth’s magnetic field is generated by the churn of its liquid nickel-iron outer core, but it is not a constant feature. Every so often, the magnetic north and south poles swap places in what are called geomagnetic reversals, and the record of these flips is preserved in rocks and sediments, including those from the ocean floor. These reversals don’t happen suddenly, but over several thousand years, where the magnetic field fades and wobbles while the two poles wander and finally settle in the opposite positions of the globe.