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Collecting sediment samples onboard ocean drillship
Kai Hinrichs, an organic geochemist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, collects a sediment sample that was drilled from the ocean floor. The work was performed onboard the ocean drillship JOIDES Resolution during an expedition off the northwest coast of South America. The expedition was conducted by Texas A&M University's Ocean Drilling Program (ODP).
Observing the procedure are Bo Jørgensen, co-chief of the Max Planck Institute of Marine Microbiology in Germany; Kim Bracchi, a core lab technician; and Kathryn Ford, a physical properties specialist from the University of Rhode Island.
More about this image
ODP, which is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and 22 international partners, explores on a global scale, the crust beneath the ocean in order to learn more about the composition, structure and history of the submerged portion of the Earth's surface. The drilling process involves collecting and logging geologic samples from the floor of deep-ocean basins through rotary coring and hydraulic piston coring. The logs and samples of the cores are available to qualified scientists throughout the world for research projects.
Samples have been taken at various sites including the North Atlantic Ocean, Norwegian Sea, Mediterranean Sea, southern and equatorial Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean off the west coast of South America, Weddell Sea off Antarctica, Indian Ocean, and western and equatorial Pacific Ocean.
The general contractor for the overall management and operation of ODP is Joint Oceanographic Institutions Inc., a consortium of major U.S. oceanographic institutions. The drilling operations are managed by Texas A&M University; logging is managed by the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. (Year of image: 2002)
Credit: Ocean Drilling Program, Texas A&M University
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