Ocean Forms - Ocean Worlds: The Story of Seas on Earth and Other Planets - page 53

not, of course, have—in 1964, although the much-travelled albatross
continued to be awarded until at least 2002.
The Mohole Project, though, had shown that drilling through the
deep ocean, from a drilling platform placed on top of a ship, was pos-
sible. From that, there formed a project that started in 1966 as the
Deep Sea Drilling Project, was renamed in 1985 as the Ocean Drilling
Project, and subsequently mutated in 2003 into the Integrated Ocean
Drilling Program, which in 2013 underwent a further change to the
International Ocean Discovery Program.
No matter. It has been one of the great, and largely unsung, revolu-
tions in the Earth sciences. In just the first phase, the Deep Sea Drill-
ing Program, the ship Glomar Challenger sailed over half a million
kilometres from the tropics to polar regions, and drilled over a thou-
sand boreholes totalling 170,000 metres in up to seven kilometres of
water. 44 The many shipboard scientists who have taken part would
work 12-hour shifts, examining the core for rock type, mineralogy,
physical properties, chemistry, and fossil content. The results went on
to form an impressively weighty collection of blue-bound volumes,
and the science that came from it rewrote the history of the world.
Most of what we know about the way the ocean crust is constructed,
about the history of ocean currents, and about climate change through
the last 100 million years, comes from this extraordinary body of
knowledge culled from the deep ocean floor. It has told us more—far
more—about planetary function than any other single endeavour,
and is still largely unknown to the public.
Going Back
If we want to reconstruct the oceans of the past and go back a modest
span of time—say, to the heyday of the dinosaurs 100 million years
ago—then, thanks to the endeavours of the Ocean Drilling Project,
this is now almost straightforward. One can simply run the loop of