Continental Scientific Drilling

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This award will provide management and operational support for the conduct of continental scientific drilling projects. Continental Scientific Drilling (CSD) has a long history producing transformative science. The CSD community is large and has diverse interests, but there are significant barriers to implementing successful projects. These barriers include coordination throughout the community, technical hurdles in planning and budgeting, and difficulties in implementing and managing drilling operations. DOSECC supports the scientific drilling community by: encouraging and nurturing community efforts to develop CSD projects, preparing drilling plans and budgets, designing and fabricating equipment, and conducting scientific drilling operations. DOSECC's mission is to provide these services to the community to improve the efficiency of CSD projects and allow Principal Investigators to focus on scientific investigations.Drilling is the only method available for directly accessing and sampling the subsurface. Scientific drilling on continents is critical for understanding the Earth's third dimension including stratigraphic succession (history of earth processes), sampling poorly or non-exposed intervals, and collecting rocks altered by surface weathering processes. Drilling is also the only means for sampling the climate proxies preserved in modern and ancient lakes. Future CSD projects will address transformative concepts in the earth sciences such as climate history, human origins and migration, mass extinctions and plume volcanism. Scientific drilling has important societal benefits, including monitoring of seismic and volcanic hazards, identification of natural resources, and determination of climate variability.