ECORD

Unravelling the Earth’s history beneath the ocean floor The history of the Earth can be found beneath the floor of our oceans where rocks and sediments act as a natural library of past events. ECORD supports ocean drilling, recovering these precious archives, which give scientists a window into the past, discerning patterns and reading signals that will give us advance warning of future changes and emerging societal challenges, as Dr Gilbert Camoin explains.

The rocks and sediments beneath the ocean floor represent a vast archive of information about the history and evolution of the Earth, yet retrieving samples is by nature extremely challenging. The European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling (ECORD) brings together 15 nations and is one of three platform providers, together with the USA and Japan, which give researchers the opportunity to participate in expeditions as part of the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP). ECORD plays an important role in this respect, supporting drilling expeditions to different parts of the world. “The three platform providers are independent, but they work together to achieve the scientific objectives of the programme,” explains Dr Gilbert Camoin, the European consortium’s director.

The IODP platform providers run expeditions to recover sediments and rocks from the seafloor and below, as well as to collect subseafloor fluids, microbes, and geophysical and geochemical data by instrumenting boreholes. Networks of

boreholes can be used for active experiments to resolve important properties and processes. These expeditions are driven by science for science and society globally, addressing a wide range of research areas, encompassing fundamental issues affecting the planet: climate change, biodiversity and geohazards, including volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis. “Ocean drilling is important to each of these different topics, as well as many others,” stresses Dr Camoin.

Each of the platform providers offers facilities for ocean drilling, yet Dr Camoin says that ECORD is distinct from the American and Japanese programmes. “The American and Japanese platform providers have fixed facilities, ships with drilling and logging equipment. But we are ready to hire the right drilling or coring system for a particular scientific proposal, on an expedition-byexpedition basis,” he continues. “ECORD conducts mission-specific platform expeditions across the world. We can reach previously inaccessible areas and go where no scientific drilling project has gone before.”

ECORD expeditions The first ECORD expedition in 2004 to the Arctic basin gathered material from the Lomosonov Ridge, an underwater mountain chain located around 1,000 metres below the sea surface. A number of further expeditions have since been conducted, in locations as diverse as Tahiti, the Gulf of Corinth, the Chicxulub Impact Crater offshore Mexico, and the Great Barrier Reef.

The scientific objectives of these different expeditions have varied, with some requiring shallow water drilling at depths of 20 to 60 metres, while Dr Camoin says others have gathered material from much deeper. “The record in the IODP programme in terms of water depth is in Japan, where we drilled at a depth of more than 8,000 metres,” he says. Drilling at these kinds of depths is extremely challenging, yet modern tools and infrastructure are up to the task. “We have diversified the drilling capabilities, and we are able to work more or less everywhere with ECORD,” continues Dr Camoin.

Image Right: Working deck of the Fugro Synergy drilling vessel (© D. Smith, ECORD-IODP).

Image Below: Fugro Synergy drilling vessel at the start of IODP Expedition 381 ‘Corinth Active Rift Development’ operated by ECORD in October-December 2018 (© R. Gawthorpe, ECORD-IODP).

Rotary coring bit with core catcher (© D. Smith, ECORD-IODP).

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This represents a great opportunity for scientists to gather interesting material, from which new insights can be drawn.

Ocean drilling is crucial to a number of major contemporary concerns which are also set to affect future generations, such as climate change, biodiversity and geohazards, so Dr Camoin says a lot of emphasis is placed within the programme on training young scientists and heightening awareness. “We want to provide young scientists with the opportunity to participate,” he stresses. Around 50 percent of the scientists sailing on the expeditions are early-career scientists, part of a wider commitment to training the next generation and equipping them with the skills they will need to push the research agenda forward.

“This is an achievement we’re really proud of.

We want to expose the younger generation to outstanding science,” says Dr Camoin.

The next ECORD expedition is set to leave in September 2019, in which researchers plan to gather samples from a succession of drowned coral reefs around Hawaii, at depths of between 134 and 1,115 metres, with the goal defining the nature of sea-level change in the central Pacific over the last 500,000 years. Specialists in certain fields, including sedimentology, geochemistry, palaeontology

and microbiology are required to achieve the expedition’s scientific goals. “We recruit scientists with specific expertise to ensure that the scientific objectives of the expedition will be met,” explains Dr Camoin. The application process is however open to researchers from other disciplines beyond those specifically mentioned in the documentation. “We want to open the application process up as much as possible to different disciplines, to make sure that we can extract as much science as we can from the cores and samples that we gather

the rocks and to reconstruct depositional environments. There are also a range of petrographical, mineralogical, geophysical and geochemical techniques,” explains Dr Camoin. Dating the samples is of course an important step in terms of building a fuller picture, while further scientific insights can also be gained. “We extract the core fluids from the sediments to analyse their chemical condition. We also study fluids circulating through the ocean floor,” continues Dr Camoin.

If you want to understand the background to climate change, you have to understand what happened in the past concerning the climatic evolution of different regions. during the expedition,” says Dr Camoin.

A variety of analytical techniques can be applied on the cores once they have been retrieved from the ocean, as scientists look to gain new insights and deepen their understanding. Different tools are available, depending on the precise nature of the sediments or rocks. “There is sedimentology, which is used to look at the physical properties of the sediment or

The cores collected by ECORD may be partly analysed on board the vessel, and then sent for further investigation to the very well-equipped Bremen Core Repository (BCR), one of three IODP core repositories where all drilled cores and samples gathered over the last 50 years are stored. Once an expedition has concluded, the data gathered is eventually made more widely available to the scientific

community for further analysis. “The results are not restricted to the scientists who sailed on the expedition, they’re open to other researchers,” stresses Dr Camoin.

This not only helps researchers to extract all the possible scientific insights from the cores that have been gathered, but also to heighten awareness of the IODP and its wider importance to research, such as in investigating climate change. “If you want to understand the background to climate change, you have to understand what happened in the past concerning the climatic evolution of different regions, in particular at the high latitudes, both the Arctic and the Antarctic,” says Dr Camoin.

This is of course a prominent concern today, and continued research is essential to informing the ongoing debate about climate change and the likely extent of any future rise in sea levels. Analysis of sediment cores and sensor data from below the seafloor can also lead to important insights in a number of other areas, including seismology, volcanic hazards and microbes in the ocean crust, underlining the wider scientific importance of ocean drilling.

“The IODP aims to gather data relevant to both fundamental and applied issues facing

society,” explains Dr Camoin. Alongside the scientific expeditions, ECORD also runs educational activities, aiming to help train the next generation of researchers. “We organise summer schools, and we pay the fees and travel costs for students to attend,” continues Dr Camoin. “There are talks from researchers, and students also do practical work on dealing with cores. It’s a really thorough training course.”

This also serves to heighten awareness of the ocean drilling programme among stakeholders and the general public, which is crucial to securing continued funding, and hence its long-term future. Beyond the expedition to Hawaii, further expeditions are planned. “In 2020, we will work with our Japanese colleagues and implement an expedition jointly to offshore Japan, to core sediments related to different historical earthquakes. We will develop a deep-sea record of earthquakes, and we will look to see how far back in time we can extend it,” says Dr Camoin. The next major expedition after that is likely to be in 2021, when Dr Camoin says the plan is to return to the Arctic Ocean. “We aim to investigate the climate history of the Arctic Ocean over the last 55 million years,” he outlines.

View from the drill rig used during IODP Expedition 325 ‘Great Barrier Reef Environment’ operated by ECORD in March-April 2010 (© D. Smith, ECORD-IODP).

ECORD

European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling Project Objectives

The European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling (ECORD), is a management structure of 15 member countries as part of the 2013-2023 International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP). Through scientific ocean drilling, the IODP science addresses a wide range of fundamental and applied issues for society, such as Climate and Ocean Change, Biodiversity and Origin of Life, Earth in Motion and Earth Structure and Dynamics.

Project Funding

$17.5 Million per year.

Project Partners

Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Austria), University of British Columbia (Canada), Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation (Denmark), Academy of Finland (Finland), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France), Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Germany), Geological Survey of Ireland (Ireland), Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (Italy), Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (The Netherlands), Research Council of Norway (Norway), Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portugal), Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad (Spain), Swedish Research Council (Sweden), Fonds National Suisse de la Recherche Scientifique (Switzerland), United Kingdom Research and Innovation (United Kingdom)

Contact Details

Dr Gilbert Camoin Director of the European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling (ECORD) Managing Agency CEREGE-CNRS, Europôle Méditerranéen de l’Arbois, BP 80, 13545 Aix-en-Provence, France T: +33 4 42 97 15 14 E: camoin@cerege.fr W: www.ecord.org Dr Gilbert Camoin

CoreWall system with CT scans and cores (© E. Le Ber, ECORD-IODP).

Various drill bits used for drilling different lithologies (© ECORD-IODP).

Drill cores stored at the Bremen Core Repository, MARUM, University of Bremen, Germany (© V. Diekamp, ECORD-IODP).

Dr Gilbert Camoin is Senior Research Scientist at the CNRS-CEREGE, Aix-enProvence, France. His major scientific interests concern the records of sea level and environmental/climatic changes by reef systems and the impact of such changes on carbonate systems. Since 2012, he is managing the European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling (ECORD), the European participation to the International Ocean Discovery Program.

Core catcher sample (© A. Rae, ECORD-IODP).

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EU Research

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