Éditeur(s) : HAL CCSD Oceanography Society
Résumé : In April 1961, 13.5 m of basalts were drilled off Guadalupe Island about 240 km west of Mexico's Baja California, together with a few hundred meters of Miocene sediments, in about 3500 m of water. This fi rst-time exploit, reported by John Steinbeck for Life magazine, aimed to be the test phase for the considerably more ambitious Mohole project, whose objective was to drill through the oceanic crust down to Earth's mantle (Lill and Bascom, 1959; Bascom, 1961). Born in the late 1950s, the Mohole project unfortunately ended in muddy waters and was terminated by the United States Congress in 1965 (Shor, 1985; Greenberg, 1971). Undeterred, the scientifi c community rallied again to launch the Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) in 1968, followed by the Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) in 1985, and the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) in 2003. These programs have provided solutions to some of the most pressing and interesting problems in ocean and earth science (see, for example, Oceanography 19-4, December 2006).the early 1970s, almost 15 years after the fi rst Mohole attempt, attendees of a Penrose fi eld conference (Conference Participants, 1972) formulated the concept of a layered oceanic crust composed of lavas, underlain by sheeted dikes, then gabbros (corresponding to the seismic layers 2A, 2B, and 3, respectively), which themselves overlay mantle peridotites. Deep drilling into the oceanic crust would provide the ground truth for the Penrose model; the fl ame of the Mohole project still burned. This article draws from results of more than 30 years of ocean drilling at mid-ocean ridges or in older igneous oceanic crust and briefl y reviews some important milestones that improved understanding of crustalaccretion processes at mid-ocean ridges. Figure 1 shows the locations of the numerous DSDP, ODP, and IODP expeditions to which we refer; Table 1 lists site locations.
ISSN: 1042-8275

hal-00407192
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00407192

Éditeur(s) : HAL CCSD Copernicus Publications
Résumé : Drilling an ultra-deep hole in an intact portion of oceanic lithosphere, through the crust to the Mohorovičić discontinuity (the ‘Moho'), and into the uppermost mantle is along-standing ambition of scientific ocean drilling (Bascom,1961; Shor, 1985; Ildefonse et al., 2007). It remains essential to answer fundamental questions about the dynamics of the Earth and global elemental cycles. The global system of mid-ocean ridges and the new oceanic lithosphere formed at these spreading centers are the principal pathways for energy and mass exchange between the Earth's interior, hydrosphere, and biosphere. Bio-geochemical reactions between the oceans and oceanic crust continue from ridge to subduction zone, and the physical and chemical changes to the ocean lithosphere provide inventories of these thermal, chemical, and biological exchanges.
ISSN: 1816-8957

hal-00564847
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00564847
DOI : 10.2204/iodp.sd.10.07.2010