In the early summer of this year, a ship set sail around the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. But this wasn’t any ordinary ship. For almost 40 years the Joides Resolution drilled into the ocean floor to collect samples and data that helped scientists to study Earth’s history and structure. Expeditions on the vessel have made a vital contribution to our understanding of the climate crisis, the tectonic plates theory, the origin of life on Earth and natural hazards such as earthquakes and eruptions. Yet the two-month voyage around Svalbard was to be its last.
The National Science Foundation (NSF), the US agency that provided scientists at Texas A&M University with funds for the ship, announced last year it would not give money for the drilling vessel past September 2024. It was a declaration that shocked the global scientific community and meant that Svalbard would be the ship’s final outing.
The vibration isolated television is attached to the drillpipe and is used to image the seafloor before drilling begins. Photograph: Lisa Crowder/IODP JRSO
“Being deprived of this workhorse is devastating because we can’t get these data in any other way,” says Thomas Ronge, the project manager of the Svalbard expedition. “We are losing our potential to read the history book of climate change.”
To understand the significance of the loss of the drilling vessel, it is useful to look at the evolution of this type of exploration and what it has attempted to achieve – in many cases successfully.
It began in earnest in the early 1960s, when a group of scientists embarked on a mission to drill down from a floating barge, called Cuss I, to the border between the crust, the Earth’s outermost layer, and the mantle, the next and thickest layer. Project Mohole, as it was known, was recorded by the novelist and amateur oceanographer John Steinbeck in an article for Life magazine. “This is the opening move in a long-term plan of exploration of the unknown two-thirds of our planet that lies under the sea,” he wrote. “We know less about this area than we do about the moon.”
The Cuss 1 barge off of Guadalupe Island, when Mohole Project attempted to drill through Earth’s second layer, March 1961. Photograph: Fritz Goro/Life/Shutterstock
Pilot Norman Fowler watches sonar and radar scopes showing locations of buoys which serve as reference points for the Mohole drilling. Photograph: Fritz Goro/Life/Shutterstock
That mission was ultimately unsuccessful but it laid the foundations for scientific ocean drilling, the concept of which is simple. Strata of sediments accumulate underwater, eventually becoming rock under pressure. Unlike on land, where disparate factors change the ground conformation in unpredictable ways, layers on the sea floor usually pile up at a regular pace and remain untouched. The deeper you drill, the further back in time you can go.
After the failure of Mohole came the drill ship Glomar Challenger and, from 1985, the Joides Resolution. As recently as last year, 62 years after the Mohole project recounted by Steinbeck, scientists aboard the Joides managed to extract rock samples from the Earth’s mantle for the first time. “We did it,” said one of the expedition members to the New York Times. “We now have a treasure trove of rocks that will let us systematically study the processes that people believe are relevant to the emergence of life on the planet.”
Carbonate chimneys captured during an expedition to a deep sea hydrothermal vent system, 2005. Photograph: D Kelley/M Elend/UW/URI-IAO/Noaa/The Lost City Science Team
Yet such discoveries, at least using a US-funded vessel, appear unlikely in the near future.
“[The end of the funding] is a huge loss to science and to everyone,” says Adriane Lam, a researcher at Binghamton University in New York, who was aboard the Joides this summer for the ship’s last expedition. “The stuff we’re finding has huge implications for things like where people live and may not be able to live in the future if the Earth keeps warming up.”
On its last expedition, the Joides drilled into the sea floor to help scientists understand how an ice sheet in the Arctic Ocean collapsed thousands of years ago. Analysing how the Svalbard ice sheet melted, researchers hope to be able to model the possible collapse of a vulnerable equivalent in the west Antarctic.
The NSF attributed its decision to end its funding to rising costs and a lack of financial support from the International Ocean Discovery Program’s partners. But many see the expenditure for the ship as paltry compared with its benefits. To put it in perspective, the total NSF budget for 2023 was close to $10bn (£7.5bn); the $71m spent on the Joides is 0.7% of that.
Expertise among the Joides team will be lost if the ship loses its funding and staff find new jobs. Photographs: Erick Bravo/IODP and Thomas Ronge/IODP
The loss of the Joides also opens up opportunities for other countries to get ahead in the race for discovery. Some of the Joides’ crew have already been contacted by what may be the next protagonist of scientific ocean drilling: China. In December last year, Beijing launched its first drilling vessel, the Mengxiang, a super-advanced ship that will most probably take over the field.
“People were shocked and caught out off guard when NSF made that announcement,” says Suzanne O’Connell, a professor of earth and environmental sciences at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. “In a way, the fact that the Chinese have built their vessel could help spur us to build a new one.”
The Joides on an expedition in the Santorini caldera near the Palea and Nea Kameni volcanos, January 2023, to help understand how and why volcanoes erupt. Photograph: Thomas Ronge/IODP
On an expedition to Iceberg Alley – where many icebergs melt – in the Antarctic, April 2019. Core samples of debris released from melted icebergs can provide insights into the history of melting of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Photograph: Thomas Ronge/IODP
O’Connell did two expeditions with the Glomar Challenger and eight on the Joides. She is now appealing to US members of Congress and the media to try to salvage the ship.
One slender hope remains for the Joides to avoid the scrapyard. A bill proposed to the House in July asked the NSF to use $60m to continue operating the vessel for at least three missions next year. According to a spokesperson for the congressman Michael McCaul – the Republican representative for Texas A&M University’s district who is pushing for the extra funding – the chances of the bill passing are “high”. However, it probably will not be voted on until mid-December at the earliest and its final text is anything but definitive.
A scan of the last core retrieved by the Joides in front of Svalbard on 26 July 2024. After having drilled about 373,000 meters of sediments and rocks in almost 40 years of missions, these are the last 4.46 meters of sediments extracted. Photograph: Expedition 403 Science Party
In the meantime, the equipment belonging to Texas A&M is being taken off the ship and the crew are likely to move to new jobs. It is not clear if there would be time to make the Joides operational again at that point, and James McManus, the NSF’s director of ocean sciences, says he “cannot speculate on this scenario”.
With no guarantees for the future, several drilling projects have been postponed indefinitely, and an entire branch of science risks stalling, at least in the west.
“We lose the ship, which is already a big blow,” says Ronge, now in Texas working on the cores from the last expedition. “But the worst part is losing the expertise, because if the people that can now run the ship blindfolded will find other jobs or retire, their knowledge will be gone. And without them it will take a decade before we return to full capacity.”
Thomas Ronge on the bridge of the Joides looking for icebergs during an Antarctic expedition in Iceberg Alley, April 2019. Photograph: Thomas Ronge/IODP
