Cores recovered from below the seafloor provide clues to open questions in Earth science. A looming gap in international ocean drilling requires renewed support and urgent action.
Nature Geoscience spoke with Susanne M. Straub, an igneous geochemist at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory; Susan Q. Lang, a chemical oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; and Yige Zhang, a palaeoceanographer at the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, about science supported by deep ocean drilling and the impact of the recent decommissioning the JOIDES Resolution drilling vessel run by the International Ocean Discovery Program.
Much of the methane produced by the deep subseafloor biosphere is consumed by anaerobic methane oxidation with sulfate in continental shelf sediments, according to a global map and calculated budgets of methane fluxes and degradation.
Ocean sediment records suggest that the modern Antarctic Circumpolar Current did not exist before the late Miocene cooling, indicating its origin is linked to the expansion of the Antarctic Ice Sheet.
The long duration of the Middle Eocene Climatic Optimum, compared with other transient Eocene warming events, can be explained by an increase in clays forming from the weathering of silicate minerals, according to lithium isotope records of marine carbonates.
A period of continental aridification and ecosystem change occurred about seven million years ago. A global sea surface temperature reconstruction identifies cooling temperatures and a strengthened meridional temperature gradient at this time.
Melts from diverse mantle components are delivered to the lower oceanic crust and preserved at centimetre scale, according to the wide range in the Nd and Sr isotope composition of gabbroic minerals from a segment of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
Carbonated silicate melts are expected to exist in the mantle, but have been elusive in nature. Geochemical analyses of rocks from the South China Sea identify such melts formed in the mantle and erupted at the surface through thin lithosphere.
Subduction zones consume seafloor carbonates. Laboratory experiments on carbonate fault gouge from the Costa Rican subduction zone show that carbonates weaken with increasing temperature and pore-fluid pressure, and may nucleate earthquakes.
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