By retrieving rocks from under the sea, the 46-year-old JOIDES Resolution (JR), the flagship of the U.S.-led International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP), traveled through time. Across 192 expeditions, it drilled samples tracing swings over the past few million years in ocean currents responsible for the Asian monsoon, extracted 25-million-year-old sediments to track the ebb and flow of the early Antarctic ice sheet, and probed the 66-million-year-old buried crater left by the dinosaur-killing asteroid impact. But in September, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) retired the vessel when no new partner country materialized to fill a budgetary gap. The JR, owned by the shipping firm Sea1 Offshore, now sits in the harbor of Kristiansand, Norway, its laboratories stripped of equipment, its staff laid off or reassigned.
“It was the best of the best of international collaboration,” says Kristen St. John, a marine sedimentologist at James Madison University who co-led the JR’s last cruise in August. Leadership in scientific ocean drilling now shifts to China, which this year unveiled a brand-new, dedicated drill ship, the Meng Xiang. “For the U.S. to not have a next step in place is very disappointing,” St. John says.
U.S. scientists had been scrambling to find a partner country willing to contribute $20 million to the program, adding to the $48 million mandated by Congress. Such a bump would have kept IODP and the JR going for the next half-decade. But the search came up empty. Although the U.S. House of Representatives has drafted a spending bill for this fiscal year that would increase funding to $60 million, that level, even if approved, would likely fall just short of keeping the JR going. Time is now running out, says Anthony Koppers, a marine geologist at Oregon State University and leader of the effort to keep the JR alive. “After 6 months, it becomes less viable to restart a ship like that.”
The remains of IODP will now become IODP3, a smaller program melding Europe and Japan’s previous contributions to IODP. The Japanese have long operated an advanced scientific drilling ship, the Chikyu, but it does commercial oil and gas work and is deployed sparingly for science, just once or twice a year and mostly in Japanese waters. Under IODP3, “We have plans to extend field operations for Chikyu to the west Pacific and Indian ocean,” says Gilbert Camoin, an IODP3 leader and director of the agency that manages European drilling.
Europe, meanwhile, has no dedicated drilling platform, but instead hires commercial ships for specific missions. Beginning in spring 2025, the first IODP3 expedition will follow this plan, hiring a commercial ship to drill into the continental shelf south of Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts, to explore the mystery of why freshwater from inland aquifers seems to invade the ocean, rather than vice versa. NSF will help fund the work even though it is not officially part of IODP3, Camoin says.
The United States will also hire commercial drill ships for occasional research cruises until it builds or redevelops a dedicated drilling ship. Plans for that ship are underway, says Carl Brenner at Columbia University, who directs IODP’s U.S. science support program. But it will likely take more than a decade to get it done. “Our community is resourceful and I’m sure some great science will get done,” he says. “But there’s no escaping that there will be less of it.”
