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DEEP SEA DRILLING 



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perimental holes in water depths of up to 3,600 m off San Diego and 

 western Mexico. These tests demonstrated the ability to recover 

 sediments and volcanic rock, as well as the feasibility of dynamic posi- 

 tioning of the ship, an essential requirement where the water is too deep 

 for the use of anchors. Project Mohole then foundered as the estimated 

 costs to construct the large, self-propelled platform required to meet the 

 goal of drilling through the earth's crust to sample the mantle rose to 

 unacceptable levels. 



At the same time, however, marine geologists interested in sampling 

 only the sediments and the surface of volcanic basement realized that 

 the use of existing drilling equipment and techniques on a relatively 

 mobile ship could meet their needs. Even a relatively modest program 

 was beyond the capability of any one oceanographic institution at that 

 time, however, so some form of multiinstitutional management was 

 required. 



The first such organization, created in 1962, was the LOCO ("long 

 core") committee made up of two representatives each from the In- 

 stitute of Marine Sciences of the University of Miami, Lamont 

 Geological Observatory of Columbia University, Princeton University, 

 Scripps Institution of Oceanography of the University of California, 

 and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. This committee could not 

 agree on the charter for a nonprofit corporation to manage a drilling 

 program. Lamont, Woods Hole, and Scripps then formed such a cor- 

 poration (CORE), which submitted a proposal for a drilling program. 

 LOCO did not endorse their proposal, which was not funded. Both 

 LOCO and CORE then faded away. 



In 1964, scientists from Miami, Lamont, Woods Hole, and Scripps 

 signed a formal agreement creating JOIDES (Joint Oceanographic Insti- 

 tutions for Deep Earth Sampling) to plan and propose drilling pro- 

 grams, and to designate one of its members to act as operating institu- 

 tion and to be responsible to the funding agency for management. This 

 structure was tested in 1965 when Lamont successfully managed a drill- 

 ing program on the Blake Plateau, off the southeastern United States, 

 which made use of the D/V Caldrill. 



In January 1967, Scripps, as the operating institution for JOIDES, 

 signed a contract with NSF to manage the first 18 months of the Deep 

 Sea Drilling Project (DSDP). The D/V Glomar Challenger was built 

 especially for this task and began operations in mid-1968. Subsequent 

 extensions and renewals of the Scripps-NSF contract kept Challenger at 

 sea until the fall of 1983, when this phase of ocean drilling came to an 

 end. 



Although the scientific operation of the drilling ship has changed little 



