Scientific Ocean Drilling in the news

An international expedition including University of Sydney researchers pieced together the clearest picture yet of how the Great Barrier Reef responded to dramatic environmental change over the past 30,000 years. Multiple studies since the expedition more than 10 years ago traced the reef’s retreat, regrowth and repeated collapse from the last ice age to the dawn of the modern reef.

To understand where the Earth might be headed, it’s important to know where it’s been. Throughout its existence, especially over the last couple million years, the Earth has experienced periodic cold and warm intervals, known as glacial and interglacial time periods. These cycles used to occur every 41,000 years. But somewhere between 1.2 million and 700,000 years ago, the cycle shifted to occurring every 100,000 years, a transition period known as Mid-Pleistocene Transition (MPT).

The eastern tropical Pacific Ocean is known for its large low-oxygen zones that are increasing in size, putting marine life at risk. New research shows that 15 million years ago, the opposite was true. A Michigan State University study found that oxygen-deficient waters were distributed very differently during the mid-Miocene Epoch than they are today. The Pacific Ocean’s oxygen-deficient zones were much smaller, while the Atlantic’s were much larger. Scientists had never documented this reversal before.

The impact that wiped out the dinosaurs may also have created one of Earth's most enduring underground ecosystems. A new study reveals that the Chicxulub crater hosted an active hydrothermal system for at least 8 million years, four times longer than scientists previously assumed.

A new international scientific study has uncovered a previously unknown geological structure beneath the Santorini–Kolumbo volcanic complex, offering fresh insight into the evolution of one of Europe’s most active volcanic systems. The research was published in Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, a journal of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).

Around 66 million years ago, an asteroid slammed into Earth’s atmosphere and struck the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, creating a crater called Chicxulub. That catastrophic event wiped out the mighty dinosaurs, along with three-quarters of all plant and animal species on Earth. The impact also formed an underground environment that possibly supported microbial life for millions of years, according to a new study published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

A team of international researchers has uncovered new evidence that the Chicxulub meteorite impact, long known for causing the extinction of the dinosaurs, also created an underground environment that supported life for millions of years longer than previously thought. This groundbreaking study not only reframes the narrative of Earth's most infamous mass extinction event but also offers fresh insights into the origins of life on our planet and potentially others.

The meteorite which caused the extinction of the dinosaurs also created an underground environment suited to supporting new life, and new research suggests it lasted for millions of years longer than previously suspected. The finding has surprised the international team of researchers behind it, who came to their conclusions by pairing sophisticated new analysis of samples taken from the Chicxulub crater in Mexico with computer modelling of the geological effects of the meteorite impact which formed the crater 66 million years ago.

Deep below the Tyrrhenian Sea offshore Italy, scientists drilled into what they thought would be dark mantle rock — and found pieces of granite that seemingly had no business being there. Those unexpected intrusions turned out to offer a rare glimpse of how a massive fault rapidly pulled deep Earth rocks toward the surface during the opening of a young ocean basin.