Continental Scientific Drilling (CSD) has a long history producing transformative science. In 1984, the CSD community formed a non-profit corporation, DOSECC, to encourage and nurture community efforts to develop CSD projects, prepare drilling plans and budgets, design and fabricate equipment, and conduct scientific drilling operations. In addition, since 1997 the CSD community, through DOSECC, has conducted annual workshops. The CSD community is large and has diverse interests, but significant barriers hinder implementing of projects: technical hurdles in planning and budgeting projects, difficulties in implementing and managing drilling operations, and uncertain funding. Growth and cohesion of the US scientific drilling community is also important for maintaining national competitiveness and participation in the International Continental Scientific Drilling (ICDP) Program. This workshop will address these issues by gathering scientists of diverse background and research focus to learn from the successes and challenges of recent CSD projects, discuss collaboration opportunities, and chart the course of the future of continental scientific drilling in the U.S. This will be accomplished through keynote presentations on recent CSD projects and disciplinary breakout sessions to create a vision for future theme-based workshops. The workshop findings will be gathered in a report that will be distributed widely through print and electronic forms.
Geological understanding is based upon studies of rock samples and fluids and upon real-time data on such things as state of stress, temperature, pressure, and seismic activity. Many such studies begin with collecting samples or data at the surface of the Earth. However, surface samples are affected by weathering that mutes or effaces the signals they contain about their origin or history: isotopic signatures that reflect climate at the time of origin, for example. Some situations can only be studied at depth in the Earth: distribution of fluids, temperatures, stress with depth, the nature of conduits that bring volcanic material to the surface, and the effect of earthquakes on rocks of the fault zone. For this reason, an international community has developed to implement the collection of samples and data by drilling purposeful holes to depths of a few meters to 5000 meters, or more. Historically, large-scale efforts at scientific drilling began in the ocean, especially to test the hypotheses of sea-floor spreading and plate tectonics. These efforts, much diversified, continue through the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program. A parallel effort to drill sites on land, continental scientific drilling (CSD) has addressed fundamental questions that are most appropriately explored there: detailed paleoclimate records, processes and configurations older than the oldest oceanic crust, strike-slip fault zones, volcanoes that erupt intermediate to silicic magmas, history of sedimentary basins, metallogenesis, the deep biosphere, and so forth. NSF grant EAR 1138001 supported an effort to review successes of continental scientific drilling, report on on-going or planned projects, indicate the scientific justification for a CSD program, and consider how such a program might be structured. The grant funded a workshop that was held in Arlington, Virginia on May 23-24, 2011. The US geological community has been an active participant in CSD for decades. However, the US program has, to some extent, lost its momentum as most current projects are led by non-US scientists and involve only subordinate activity of US investigators—or none at all. The workshop underwritten by this grant was intended to suggest reforms to the US CSD program, and to justify their implementation so that US investigators could return to the forefront of CSD efforts. The workshop identified sources of the current situation and suggested specific ways to move forward to improve the program: a stable funding base, a central site of support for the community, bringing other areas of investigation (including some outside geology) into the community, and expanding efforts to educate the geological profession on the necessity to drill to obtain samples and data. The proceedings of the workshop are reported in Toward a Strategic Plan for U.S. Continental Scientific Drilling: Into the New Decade, published as DOSECC Workshop Publication 3 in 2011. Copies are available from DOSECC or from A.W. Walton at twalton@ku.edu. This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
