Ocean Forms - Ocean Worlds: The Story of Seas on Earth and Other Planets - page 52

The only formality was an official award, the Albatross Award, 42 of
a real stuffed specimen 'borrowed' from a storeroom of the Scripps
Museum. Recipients included the founders of the award, Gordon Lill,
John Knauth, and Arthur Maxwell (in 1959, because they worked out
that they might not otherwise be nominated); the oceanographer
Henry Stommel in 1966 (for 'abandoning oceanography's most
cherished chairs'—he had moved between several distinguished
professorships in a short space of time); and the even more distin-
guished geophysicist Sir Edward Bullard in 1976 ('for unintelligible
magnetism'—his studies had been found hard to comprehend). 43
Amid this inspired lunacy, AMSOC was the moving spirit behind
one of the most ambitious scientific quests to explore the oceans—
the Mohole Project.
This was the idea to drill through into the deep ocean to reach
the Moho—more fully known as the Mohorovičić Discontinuity,
named after the Croatian geophysicist and meteorologist Andrija
Mohorovičić, who was the first to discover it. The Moho is the inter-
face (visible in geophysical soundings of the deep Earth) that sepa-
rates crust from mantle. Beneath the continents this boundary
usually lies more than 30 kilometres below ground, but ocean crust
is thin and it is often less than 10 kilometres below the sea floor.
Extraordinarily, the project got underway. In 1961, five holes were
drilled off Guadeloupe Island in Mexico. None of them got deeper
than 200 metres below the sea floor. No matter. They had done this
from a floating platform, through over 3.5 kilometres of ocean water—
the first time such a feat had ever been carried out. One of the holes,
too, had gone through the surface sedimentary layers into basalt—
the rock that we now know all ocean floor crust is made of.
The Mohole Project did not get further, because it was clear that it
was going to cost a lot of money to reach the Moho (indeed, this has
still not been achieved). AMSOC wound up the structure—that it did