Drilling into continental rocks provides unique information, otherwise unavailable, on many areas of fundamental and exciting science: exact time-series historical records of paleoclimate and the magnetic field, key observations at depth of seismic, volcanological and impact phenomena, information on the geobiosphere, and questions of societal importance. This workshop will bring members of the continental scientific drilling community together to implement recommendations from a previous workshop that emphasized the scientific advances possible only through drilling. It is intended to engage not only members of the CSD community but also representatives of parallel entities and overlapping communities and representatives of funding agencies in a discussion directed at enhancing the drilling community and planning for future research, necessary facilities, and funding support.
Many types of scientific investigations require drilling to acquire key samples and data for exploring natural systems and testing key hypotheses. Some such investigations require drilling into ocean basins; others are entirely land-based. Recent reports of the National Research Council on future directions in the Earth Sciences[1] have stressed central place of drill-core samples and down-hole monitoring in several potentially transformational areas of investigation. This grant supported a workshop that brought together the community of scientists from diverse fields to plan how to move forward in strengthening the US effort in land-based or continental scientific drilling (CSD). Recent and planned CSD projects have investigated or will study aspects of the interaction of hot-spot magmas with continental crust; climate controls on human evolution; Quaternary paleoclimate as recorded in successions of lake sediments in southern Argentina, eastern Siberia, Lake Van, Turkey, and the Dead Sea: and exploring rates of evolution among endemic species in Lake Ohrid, Macedonia. Presentations at the workshop included material on drilling in the Antarctic to investigate ice-margin dynamics, mechanisms of formation of meteor craters, investigations of the early history of life as recorded in isotopes and organic geochemistry in cores of Archean rock, exploration of the critical zone, where atmosphere and Earth meet, and records of the history of sea level through the Cretaceous and Cenozoic. These topics span much of the breadth of the Earth sciences and extend into biology and planetary science. Many drilling projects are of international scope, approaching key topics in the Earth sciences and including participants from several countries. Others are primarily of interest to scientists in the USA, not because they are less fundamental, but because they are of smaller scale. Projects range from a cost of a few thousand dollars to several million dollars. In any case, the projects require careful planning and management. Extensive communication among different communities that may use data from CSD efforts opens opportunities to add goals to projects with small increase in cost but potentially much greater return on investment. The Lake El’Gygytgyn project in eastern Siberia involved investigators of both paleoclimate records and meteorite impact processes. Project Hotspot evaluated geothermal resources in addition to its studies of the interaction of hotspot magmas with continental crust. This workshop resulted in Communication of results of recent drilling projects to the broader community, Discussion of plans for future projects, which can facilitate collaboration among diverse groups, and Identification of steps to strengthen the US community and provide it with the resources necessary for US scientists to participate in projects of national and international scale. Participants in the workshop recommended steps to strengthen and enlarge the US CSD community, establish standards for making data, samples, and cores that result from CSD projects available to the scientific community generally, and educating the CSD community, scientists generally, the public, and government decision makers about CSD. The most important recommendation of the workshop was that NSF should formally recognize the importance of Continental Scientific Drilling through a commitment to conduct at least a fixed level of drilling annually. Ideally, NSF should establish a CSD Program, with a program director and an adequate budget. In addition, experience has shown that a CSD facility, with adequate funding, is necessary to administer and support the US CSD effort and conduct highly specialized drilling operations. [1] E.g. Montanez, et al, 2011, Understanding Earth’s Deep Past—Lessons for Our Climate Future: National Academies Press ISBN-10: 0-309-20915-3.
