‘A huge loss’: is it the end for the ship that helped us understand life on Earth? | Science

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.

“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.”

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.”

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.