As we enter the final two weeks of JOIDES Resolution Expedition 401, we figured it was time to check in with our science team on their expedition highlights to date. So, we checked in with some of them asking…   What’s the most interesting thing you’ve found in these cores so far?   “That we can correlate individual sedimentary beds (cycles) 100s of miles between our drill sites. It’s an essential step in finding how the Mediterranean overflow behaved and changed through time.” -Trevor Williams, EPM   Image of the surface of a sediment core, and an X-ray image of the same core s ..read more

A compilation showing the relative sizes of everyday objects in microns. Microbes are types of bacteria which measure from less than 1 micron to about 3 microns. Image source: wiki commons How big is a microbe? Measuring around 1 micron, they are certainly not big enough to see with your naked eye! Microbes are everywhere on Earth – even on your skin and in your body. They are also in the oceans and make up a huge part of the living material there. Microbes have even been found deep in the ocean crust – ALIVE! These tiny living organisms may be the key to some of the processes that drive chemi ..read more

After the news that the JOIDES Resolution will no longer be supporting scientific drilling with the International Ocean Discovery Program, Expedition 399 had a new goal: legacy. The scientists onboard are not just thinking about this expedition, but are bringing back unique cores for future generations to study. “It’s like bringing rocks back from the moon, we need to be thoughtful with what we do with them,” said Frieder Klein, a marine petrologist from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. It is unclear whether the United States has a plan for a future drilling vessel. Given this uncertainty ..read more

“It’s been three days since I was outside…” I hear as a group whooshes by my desk. My office is next to the door outside, so I get snippets of conversations as people pass seeking vitamin D. I’m the outreach officer on a scientific research ship called the JOIDES Resolution, and we’ve been at sea for a week. We sailed from Tarragona, Spain, to a site near Santorini, and we’ve been parked in place for three days, drilling for samples of sediments and rocks—called cores—underneath the ocean. It’s not that surprising that the scientist passing my office hadn’t been outside for several days. Work ..read more

Throughout the expedition, I have been recording short conversations with people onboard. I’ve done this in English and then, where appropriate, also asked the person to share the same story in an additional language. I edited these conversations into short narratives and paired them with a few photos and ambient sound so they could be shared as videos. They’ve been on social media (Twitter and/or Facebook, depending on length). This is the second of two blog posts, with six people featured in each. Each blog post contains more than six videos because all languages are included. You can find P ..read more

Expedition 397 has arrived at the second site, which in IODP lore is officially called U1587. From the deck of the ship looking out at the ocean, the view is… essentially unchanged from the first stop. But the ocean here is about 1000 meters shallower, which means the whole operation of drilling into the sediment and pulling up cores goes faster. That presents the opportunity to drill even deeper. The goal here is to drill 500 meters into the sediment below the seafloor, and to do that in four successive holes. At our last site, we pulled up sediment from about 350 meters below the seafloor an ..read more

We are now on site at U1559B,  bringing up cores, (!) which makes the previous eight days of transit all worth it. It was kind of a rough ride getting here – the seas were “unsettled” (the Captain’s term, in his weather forecast).  This translated in practice as: heave (bow to stern rocking) and roll (port to starboard rocking), interacting, pretty much from the moment we hit deep water off the coast of South Africa.  For me at least, it involved a lot of hanging on to things (there are, fortunately handholds and rails along every corridor and stairway on the JR), and getting u ..read more

Hi!   It’s been a while…. Longer than I, or any of us probably, could have anticipated – delayed more than a year by COVID disruptions, that meant the ship couldn’t leave port for lack of another that would have them, and even when it could sail, the scientists couldn’t get there, thanks to travel restrictions (by countries and many universities), and also to entirely valid concerns about staying healthy in the face of a little known and potentially deadly pathogen. But, all of this is (largely) in the past, and I’m finally (!) back on the JR for a third adventure, with a bunch of n ..read more

Why are Expeditions 390 & 393 on a transect of the South Atlantic Ocean? Find out in this sixth video in the Exp 390 Story Series! https://joidesresolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Video-6-The-Transect_1.mp4     ..read more

By Allie Tessin, inorganic geochemist, Expedition 392 I’ve spent a lot of my time at sea donned in a white lab coat and goggles, analyzing the chemical composition of the rocks, sediments, and waters that we are collecting. I also spend a lot of time chatting to my colleagues excitedly about the new data that I have collected, waxing lyrically about how iron is changing or what the strange patterns in alkalinity might mean. Anyone might assume I’ve always had a passion for chemistry, but this is very much not the case. In grade school, I loved history and literature, subjects that offered the ..read more