45 



that are your reason for going there. I think that gives you some 

 concept of the extreme high tech aspect. 



When the Deep Sea DrilHng Project was started in 1968, their 

 drill ship, the Glomar Challenger, was the most advanced drilling 

 vessel in the world at the time. Our new ship, which just set sail in 

 January this year, which we have named Joides Resolution, is the 

 SEDCO 471, one of the class offshore drilling vessels. 



We have fitted it with shipboard laboratories that allow one to 

 do at sea virtually anything that can be done on land and the very 

 finest geophysical labs, and through engineering development, we 

 will soon be able to add to scientists the capabilities to get into 

 areas we simply could not get with Challenger. This includes the 

 high latitude polar seas, the hydrothermally active regions, the 

 midocean ridge crests, and into back arc basins. 



A third aspect which I will mention very briefly, but it is terribly 

 important, and that is, this is inherently a global program. We op- 

 erate worldwide on the high seas so that ocean drilling has always 

 been an internationally visible and very obvious presence in the 

 world of geosciences. 



The fourth factor is cost, although again I feel quite modest 

 about this. Nonetheless, in terms of basic research, drilling is ex- 

 pensive. To build a new drill ship today from the keel up would 

 cost something in excess of $100 million. 



Our operating costs for the program are about $35 million a 

 year. About one-third of that cost is provided by international con- 

 tributions. These costs made collaboration interesting, in the first 

 place, and they also then limit the possibility that competitive pro- 

 grams would suddenly mushroom in other places. 



I think the most significant factor for ocean drilling, for interna- 

 tional collaboration, is its absolutely enormous demand for human 

 talent. About 1,100 top scientists and technical experts in a typical 

 year devote a major segment of their productive time to the Ocean 

 Drilling Program. There just are not enough people in this field to 

 carry out this kind of program year after year without internation- 

 al collaboration. It has an extremely demanding manpower profile. 



The lessons and examples from this experience to me are a few, 

 again, to reiterate: that there must be a strong scientific rationale 

 as a precondition. Cost alone I don't think is enough. There are in- 

 conveniences, delays, disadvantages in international cooperation. I 

 think, for those to be worthwhile, there must be the sense of scien- 

 tific excitement and capability. 



In the case of the scientific drilling programs — I have said it 

 before; I will say it in a different way— a joint international pro- 

 gram of ocean drilling is vastly better than anything that any one 

 nation by itself could put in the field. 



I have already mentioned the fact that international collabora- 

 tion demands costs. There are expenses, of course, for travel, for 

 communications. But I think the far more important costs are 

 measured in time, and that is that international cooperation re- 

 quires that scientists be willing to spend their most limited re- 

 source, which is their time, on items that are often nonscientific in 

 the way of the consensus building that is essential to run success- 

 fully an international program. 



