Scientific Ocean Drilling in the news

A record of repeated retreat of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet during the past warm climates has been identified by International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) Expedition 379 Scientists. By analyzing deep-sea sediments from the Amundsen Sea and tracing their geochemical signatures, the study shows that the ice sheet retreated far inland at least five times during the warm Pliocene Epoch.

Researchers from Heriot-Watt University have confirmed the key causes behind the devastation caused by the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami. The study, part of an international research team, “provides the clearest evidence yet that a thin, clay-rich layer just beneath the seabed at the Japan Trench played a central role in allowing the magnitude 9.0 earthquake to rupture all the way to the surface”.

Due to its thick, vast ice sheet, Antarctica appears to be a single, continuous landmass centered over the South Pole and spanning both hemispheres of the globe. The Western Hemisphere sector of the ice sheet is shaped like a hitchhiker’s thumb – an apt metaphor, because the West Antarctic ice sheet is on the go.

How could a continent with a surface area of almost 5 million square kilometers, larger than India or almost two-thirds the size of Australia, remain absent from maps and ignored by the scientific world? It's because it's 95% submerged and, as a result, its boundaries have remained undefined or falsely integrated into the Australian continent.

On December 18, 2025, a 5.1 magnitude earthquake rattled the region off the coast of Hualien City in eastern Taiwan, briefly shaking buildings as far away as the capital, Taipei. According to Taiwan’s weather administration, the quake struck 18 kilometers (11 miles) offshore at a depth of 31.6 kilometers (19.6 miles), but, remarkably, no immediate reports of damage surfaced.

On March 11, 2011, an earthquake with a magnitude of 9.1 on the moment magnitude scale caused a devastating tsunami along Japan’s Pacific coast. Although Japan had prepared for the possibility of a tsunami by erecting protective seawalls along the coast, the scale of the wave exceeded all expectations.

An international research expedition involving Cornell has uncovered new details as to why a 2011 earthquake northeast of Japan behaved so unusually as it lifted the seafloor and produced a tsunami that devastated coastal communities along with the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Geologists from Heriot-Watt are part of an international research team that has confirmed why the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake off northeast Japan behaved in such an extreme and destructive way. The study, published in Science, provides the clearest evidence yet that a thin, clay-rich layer just beneath the seabed at the Japan Trench played a central role in allowing the magnitude 9.0 earthquake to rupture all the way to the surface.

Scientists for the first time have detected a slow slip earthquake in motion during the act of 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 the fault off the coast of Japan, behaving like a tectonic shock absorber.

A team of international researchers has identified a previously unknown carbon reservoir deep beneath the South Atlantic Ocean, revealing a natural process that traps enormous amounts of carbon dioxide for tens of millions of years. The discovery, led by scientists at the University of Southampton, sheds new light on the long-term exchange of carbon between the seafloor, the ocean, and the atmosphere.