Antarctica

Chapter 5.  Drilling Near Antarctica

     I have been involved in several drilling and coring projects involving Antarctica and got to go there for the better part of 11 weeks in the winter (southern hemisphere summer) of 1986 and 1987.  So, if this blog is about scientific ocean drilling, how does that relate to drilling in Antarctica – it is a continent, isn’t it?  Yes it is; a huge and somewhat unexplored continent from a geological point of view. 

     Drilling for exploration in the seas around Antarctica, or on the continent itself, has a limited history.  The main problem is just getting a large drill rig to the place as well as supporting it with a crew and supplies.  The weather is the main impediment.  Also, Antarctica is remote and not very user-friendly for such things.  In terms of severity of conditions, you can compare it to drilling on the North Slope of Alaska for oil and gas, but there are big differences.  The North Slope is much closer to civilization and infrastructure than Antarctica.  There is known to be petroleum there under the permafrost, hence a serious motivation exists for oil and gas companies to commit large sums of capital to building up drilling resources.  And the oil recovered there can be pumped immediately into the Alaskan pipeline and on its way to market and profit.  None of this applies to Antarctica.  Even getting approval to drill for commercial purposes there would entail international legal complications that would make it untenable, if not impossible at the present time.  There is every indication that oil reserves do exist under the Antarctic ice (both on shore and off) and they will someday be exploited.  But to my knowledge it has not happened yet.  I believe international treaties currently prohibit any Antarctic oil drilling until 2041, see Ref. [1].

     But drilling for geological research under the sea ice around the continent has long been one of the holy grail objectives of marine geologists.  Geologically Antarctica has a fascinating history.  It was part of the super-continent, Gondwanaland , until tectonic forces caused it to break away and “drift” (over the mantle, not over the waves) to its present day location straddling the south pole, separating from a brief marriage with Australia along the way.  Core samples taken offshore in the Weddell Sea on our voyage revealed ancient spores from certain trees and ferns, providing a clue to the warm tropical climate that would have been required for those plants to prosper 70-100 million years ago.  Other paleomagnetic and paleontological evidence has confirmed that the continent once occupied an equatorial address.  The theory behind Antarctica’s continental drift history was well established but before any of it could be verified (by actual core sampling, known as ground-truthing) some large deepwater drilling rig had to go to the waters off Antarctica to core and recover some significant samples.  See New York Times article from the time, Ref. [5].

     The Glomar Challenger took a good crack at the problem in 1972-73 on one expedition drilling in the Ross Sea and around Wilkes Land south of Australia.  Unfortunately that season turned out to be a heavy ice year when conditions would not allow a non-icebreaker vessel to get very close to the actual continental boundaries.  Everyone remembers the Titanic and its encounter with a piece of an iceberg – nobody would consider allowing a non-ice-strengthened drillship to suffer a similar fate.

     In December of 1986 I was part of an ODP expedition onboard the JOIDES Resolution to the Weddell Sea, offshore Antarctica, just south of the tip of South America, where the next attempt would be made at conducting serious subsea drilling and coring operations in the waters off Antarctica.  We hoped to get closer to the continent than ever before in history where we would drill as many sites as possible giving due consideration to safe conditions when surrounded by sea ice and icebergs.  We were lucky;  that season turned out to be a favorable ice year in which the annual pull-back of the sea ice got closer to the continent than in most earlier years.  I was introduced to the phenomenon of the “polynya”, a borrowed Russian word for hole in permanent pack ice.  Antarctic polynya events are seasonal, unpredictable, and rarely extensive during any given austral summer.  We were fortunate to be treated to one of the biggest polynya “seasons” ever recorded in the Weddell Sea just at the time we were scheduled to be there.  The opening of the pack ice allowed the Resolution and our escort vessel, the Maersk Master, to get to offshore sites normally inaccessible to any ships except icebreakers, which are not drillships.  Note:  there have been a few ice-capable smaller vessels outfitted to conduct a limited amount of offshore science research drilling in the presence of oceanic pack ice, but their impact on the marine geology world has been limited and was still years away in 1987. 



ACEX Arctic Drilling -- (near to far) Converted
workboat with small drill rig, Norwegian
icebreaker, Oden, and Russian
nuclear icebreaker, Sovetskiy Soyuz

One project for which I acted as a minor advisor included a workboat fitted with a small drill rig that succeeded in becoming first to drill under the Arctic ice cap.  It did so in the company of two icebreakers (one a Russian nuclear vessel) during the famous ACEX expedition under the auspices of IODP in 2004.  Photo at left, courtesy [2]

     A note about offshore ice.  Go in a ship anywhere near Antarctica and you learn a lot about ice in the ocean.  First, there are two completely different and distinct kinds – icebergs and sea ice or pack ice.  Sea ice is surface seawater that freezes over every winter.  Some of it gets so thick that it does not melt during the austral summer, gets pushed into more dense packs and eventually becomes designated as pack ice.  It is perpetually found around the shores of the Antarctic continent.  Ice breakers can force their way through it if the conditions are right.  Some pack ice is forever trapped against the land, some floats free and is blown around by the southern ocean winds.  It breaks up and days later re-congregates.  Pack ice is generally not life-threatening to a modern ship, although there are plenty of historical incidents of ships unexpectedly stuck in pack ice that become trapped long enough for the gathering ice to crush the hulls.  This problem was a lot more frightening in the days of sailing ships with wooden hulls.  Look up the history of Ernest Shackelton’s explorations and loss of his specially strengthened wooden sailing ship, Endurance, which was trapped and sunk in pack ice in the Weddell Sea in 1915.  Mandatory reading for anyone going to Antarctica.
     Pack ice is moved primarily by winds because the draft is only a matter of feet.  Icebergs are moved mainly by currents because they have deep drafts, up to 800 feet.  It is not uncommon to see icebergs plow straight through a region covered with pack ice when winds and currents operate in different directions.



A Classic Tabular Iceberg -- No telling how
far it extends out of frame to the right

 Icebergs are not really related to pack ice.  They are born by calving off one of the glaciers that slowly advance to the sea from the steep continental flanks.  At first the glacier edge, known as an ice shelf, just floats on the near-shore water.  But eventually the outer sections calve off and form tabular icebergs.  This process has a lot of random qualities, so Antarctic tabular icebergs come in all sizes.  Some are hundreds of miles long on their long axis.  (The largest on record was reputedly 200 x 60 miles.)  We encountered one of the lesser giants on our Weddell Sea expedition that required about 6-7 hours to sail completely past, at 11 knots.  It seemed like we should climb aboard, plant a flag and claim it for the home country.  Many of these enormous tabular bergs have lifespans measured in decades.  Most eventually drift away from the continent and get caught up in the circum-Antarctic currents where they spend years circling the continent and gradually melting.  NASA operates polar-orbiting satellites that track large bergs around Antarctica.  During our voyage we could print out “iceberg maps” giving updated information about individual berg locations.  We expected this would be a big help to navigation but found out that the NASA system had a minimum size of at least 20 miles length for the bergs they continuously monitored -- not much help when a berg as small as 200-300 foot long could push our ship around like a toy.  The ice sticking out of the water would have matched height with our derrick but the 600-800 ft draft would have made it a lot more massive than our ship.

     Tabular bergs are big and flat (generally about 200+ feet of ice above the waterline) and level on the ocean.  They eventually deteriorate due to melting, storm damage, colliding, and running aground so that in time they break completely apart or big chunks break off.  The chunks are generally not stable floating flat so they tilt to find a floating equilibrium attitude. 



D/V JOIDES Resolution and
small "mountain-shaped" iceberg

This produces the classic mountain-shaped berg (as in the picture, left) that most people envision – giving rise to the expression “the tip of the iceberg”.  Bergs breaking up and deteriorating produce a lot of general ice rubble – thousands upon thousands of smaller berg pieces in every size down to cocktail ice.  Big ones are bergs; smaller ones are “bergy bits”; ranging in size from large houses to compact cars.  Still smaller pieces are called “growlers” because, especially at night, they are not observed until the moving ship rubs up against them and they make a growling noise as they slide down the length of the hull.

     Successful and safe navigation around Antarctic ice involves avoiding pack ice that a non-icebreaker cannot handle, avoiding collision while moving with large bergs or bergy bits, and trying to avoid rubbing against too many growlers.  We found that it was a fairly easy chore to avoid ice disaster as long as everybody was vigilant and exercised good anticipation of ice plus ship movements.  The bergs bigger than small bergy bits show up very clearly on modern radar at a range allowing plenty of time for the moving ship to sail carefully around.  Smaller bergy bits and growlers had to be visually spotted by lookouts in order to avoid them, but our ship could handle some minor collisions with them without fear of significant damage.  At night the lookouts’ job was more difficult so the solution was to either avoid sailing thru ice-infested waters after dark, or go slowly with the lookouts using a searchlight to spot dangerous ice.  The good news is that when you are that far south in the austral summer the sun literally never sets.  It does get darker around midnight but that twilight darkness is only a minor problem for navigation. 

     When we were underway in ice-clogged areas our ice lookouts were some of our rig floor roustabouts, who were all Filipino in those days.  The ship’s doctor worried about their health since the lookout station was a platform literally hanging out in front of the bow where there was almost no wind shelter and it got bitterly cold.  He commented about what a poor plan it was to have tropical natives assigned to such cold weather duty and predicted wryly that if we ever had need for lookouts on some equatorial cruise we would probably go out and hire Eskimos for the job.

     We also had to avoid ice when we were station-keeping over a drill site and unable to move quickly because we had 1000s of feet of drill pipe suspended from the ship into the hole in the seafloor.  That was a much more serious problem.  It was not life- or ship-threatening because icebergs moving toward us on a collision course would not do so rapidly.  (It was like the world’s slowest game of Space Invaders.)  But it required careful management -- we could certainly not tolerate constant interruptions to sidestep advancing bergs if we expected to get any drilling accomplished.  To help with this part of the operation we chartered the Maersk Master ocean-going workboat to accompany us as an ice management vessel.  The MM would scout out planned drill sites before we arrived to check for quantity of ice in the vicinity, when the drillship was working at a site they would scout up-current and up-wind to see what ice was approaching the vessel, and they would try, at least, to deflect approaching bergs that might otherwise collide with the ship when the drillship could not be quuickly moved out of the way.  
     Nobody was completely sure how that berg-deflection plan would work out but we came prepared.  One trick we planned was to include a long polypropylene rope on a winch drum with floats onboard the MM that could be used to “lasso” a medium size or smaller berg and tow it aside.  Would this actually work?  The technique had some prior trials with icebergs in the waters around Greenland with some success.  Everyone was convinced it would work on bergs up to a certain size but what would be the limit?  We had a couple successes in the iceberg-towing operations but mainly it was futile.  The smaller bergs resisted getting the floating rope securely around them (because of their shapes the rope would slip completey under the berg, or cause the berg to topple and allow the rope to pass over the top).  And those bergs could generally be moved more easily by having the MM simply push on them tugboat style.  Larger bergs proved to be more than a match for the 20,000 horsepower of the MM and we eventually had to give way to a number of big ones when they stubbornly continued on courses too close to the drillship for comfort. 



Maersk Master Workboat -- preparing
 to "tow" a large iceberg 

 The photo at left shows the MM latching onto and trying to move an iceberg that we guessed was likely the most massive floating thing ever towed at that time, estimated at 12 million tons.  (This picture appeared in the NY Times after our expedition, Ref [5].)  I don’t say that the MM succeeded in “towing” the berg, however, because it certainly appeared to be the other way around.  The berg never came dangerously close to the Resolution, in any case, so the operation was a success.

     There have been other research drilling projects conducted on the Antarctic continent and the adjacent seas or glacial ice shelves still attached to the land.  The ice shelf drilling has been conducted by the ANDRILL group headquartered in New Zealand who have successfully sampled the seafloor under permanent, fixed shelf ice and will soon penetrate the seafloor under fast-moving glacial ice that creeps away from land at several meters per day.  Drilling from atop fast-moving ice to a fixed spot on the seafloor is a pretty good trick, if you think about it.  See Ref [3]. 
     A Russian-American-British research team have capped off nearly two decades of drilling thru the Antarctic continental ice with a remarkable breakthrough – reaching the waters of Lake Vostok, buried for 15-25 millions of years under more than 12,000-ft of never moving ice.  This drilling differs from the ANDRILL and ODP subsea drilling efforts in that the Vostok drilling was through all ice; part drilling, part melting to produce a borehole.  ANDRILL and ODP as well as ACEX Arctic drilling, mentioned above, entail actual rotary drilling and sampling in seafloor sediments and rocks.

For some additional reading see,

[1]  Article about future concerns about oil drilling in Antarctica

http://jonbowermaster.com/blog/2010/06/is-oil-drilling-next-for-the-arctic-and-antarctica/

[2]  IODP Expedition 302, Arctic Coring Expedition (ACEX):  A First Look at the Cenozoic Paleoceanography of the

Central Arctic Ocean  http://ic.ucsc.edu/~acr/BeringResources/Articles%20of%20interest/Central%20Artic/Backman_%20Moran%20and%20McInroy%20et%20al%202005.pdf

[3]  Details ANDRILL scientific drilling through the ice shelves to the seafloor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANDRILL

[4]  Details of drilling through continental ice to Lake Vostok

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Vostok

[5]  NY Times article about Leg 113 – Antarctica, by Walter Sullivan, NY Times science writer.

http://www.nytimes.com/1987/04/21/science/ocean-sediments-tell-tale-of-green-antarctica.html

Anecdote:  “You Find Some of the Darndest Things in the Ocean – The FAD and the Tree”

     These are two stories loosely connected according to the title of this anecdote.  

The FAD.  I got his story from Glen Foss, one of my long-time colleagues at both DSDP and ODP.  That is Glen in the picture – the one with the beard and the quizzical look on his face examining something that looks suspiciously like the stub end of a broken piece of drill pipe.  The fact that it is being examined at the vertical while still over the rotary table suggests it just came out of the ocean having lost everything in the drillstring below.  A bad and unlucky day in the drilling business.  On a land rig, or offshore oil rig, the broken drillstring in the hole would not be lost.  It would be “fished” out and recovered, although sometimes with considerable difficulty.  Not so when a floating drilling vessel drops drillpipe when drilling in open hole.  In that case the lost pipe falls to the seafloor, probably in a pile resembling spaghetti, never to be seen or recovered.



Scene on the rig floor of Glomar Challenger

     Glen is now happily retired and living north of San Diego.  He was my mentor in the obscure trade of directing science drilling operations at sea on the Glomar Challenger and JOIDES Resolution.  He and I only sailed together on two or three expeditions, but Glen sailed on an astonishing 47 separate cruises, most of which were two months in duration.  Talk about dedication.  It is a wonder his wife and family recognize him to this day.

     So back to the FAD story with details from Glen who was directing operations on that unusual voyage.  The Resolution was setting up to begin drilling at a site in the Sulu Sea, between the Philippines and Borneo.  The ship took up position and dropped an acoustic positioning beacon to the seafloor (which would enable the ship to maintain station at that exact location in the open ocean for as many days as was required to complete the drilling and coring).  At the time the crew noticed a piece of flotsam (floating junk) some distance away but paid it no attention.  The drillstring was lowered into the approximately 5000m of water trying to tag the seafloor and begin the actual work of drilling and coring.

     The running-in of the drillstring did not proceed quite normally and some odd resistance was felt.  The ship was repositioned a few hundred feet in hopes of finding a less difficult place to begin the actual hole in the seafloor, even though there should not have been any problems at all.  At this point in the proceedings Glen recalls that he absently noted the floating object had moved closer to the ship rather than floating away as expected.  Hmmm.  Within a few hours the crew found out why. 
     The drillstring had become hopelessly fouled with miles of polypropylene rope.  It was wound around the drillpipe and clearly attached to the mysterious floating object, which turned out to be an FAD (Fish Attracting Device), in this case a raft-like object made of oil drums, wood, and palm fronds.  Amazingly it had been anchored to the seafloor with roughly 7000m (!) of the plastic rope.  Any reasonable, experienced sailor would have said nothing like that raft could possibly be anchored in such a depth.  But it certainly had been, and very soon the problem got worse.

     The drill crew had no choice but to cut loose the FAD raft, slowly recover most of the drillstring, and pull in and chop up a mountain of poly rope.  Thinking all was well the Resolution crew went back to work until a local fishing boat appeared over the horizon and approached the ship.  Sitting on its deck was the now-familiar FAD float.  The not-so-happy fishermen requested to come aboard and wanted reparations for their lost materials.   They were eventually paid in full for their losses by the Ocean Drilling Program -- this despite the fact that the Captain was fuming that anything anchored in the open ocean and unlighted was an illegal hazard to navigation.  The amount of money involved was not enough to make a fuss over and I guess you can never buy too much goodwill.

The Tree in the Ocean.  One of the pleasures for me of going to sea is to enjoy the actual voyage itself.  I loved to go over the navigational charts on the bridge and monitor our position as we sailed through some pretty remote and even exotic places in the world.  I have always loved maps this way – flashback to many happy backpacking trips into the mountain wildernesses of the West using a topo map and compass to find hidden gems of places well off the established trials.  If you’ve never seen modern navigational charts you’d be surprised how detailed and accurate they are in this age.  These charts trace their roots back to man’s earliest voyages on the oceans – they represent a very evolved and useful, if not to say vital, seafaring art form.

     On one expedition somewhere around the Philippines, Guam, or south of the Japanese islands (I no longer remember exactly where) we were crossing a long expanse of open ocean, which usually means the nav chart is less interesting than when you are nearer to land.  But on this day a couple of us spotted a very odd notation in the open ocean close to our planned route.  It was a symbol of a large tree, like an oak or elm in full spread of branches and leaves.  No land around, just the tree symbol.  And it was labeled, not too surprisingly, and without further clarification, “Tree”.  We corralled the Captain and showed him the symbol and asked, what the heck is that?  He didn’t know either, but noted that the water depth went suddenly from thousands of feet to just a handful of feet in the immediate vicinity of the tree.  No island shown, but some shallow water, probably the remains of a seamount or guyot (a small mesa under the ocean.) or maybe a submerged atoll.  The captain was now intrigued as well and pointed out that the Tree was very close to our planned route and had water deep enough within a mile that we could safely sail by close enough to get a good look through binoculars.

     Now, I’ve observed plenty of felled trees floating on their sides in the ocean, and seen some odd notations on navigation charts for buoys and rocks and lighthouses, and so on, but this Tree was something new – it could not possibly be just a “tree” sticking up in the open ocean.  But it turned out indeed to be just that.  Don’t ask me what kind of tree, or how it could prosper rooted under the waves in several feet of seawater miles and miles from any dry land.  (We sailed by before I managed to take a picture).  Not only was it a big, healthy looking tree standing perhaps 30-40 feet out of the water, but it hosted a tiny village of fragile-looking huts built up on stilts and all more or less attached to the tree and each other.  Most of the building materials appeared to be driftwood.  Clearly a tiny village of people lived there,  (maybe the village was officially named, "Tree".)  We could make out one or two small boats with outboard motors tied up to the huts and connecting elevated walkways.  We never did see any people, but guessed they were either off fishing, hiding, or a bit weary of sightseers dropping by unannounced to rubber neck in their neighborhood.

     I do wish I had more detail about this bizarre tree-village.  So I’d like to throw the question open to the readers of this blog.  Does anyone know of this amazing place?  Where it is exactly?  Who lives there?  And are they still living in those huts despite the obvious problems of surviving storms and getting basic supplies to and from the nearest land?  I should note that in most parts of the open ocean there is very little tide so at least that was probably not one of the villagers’ big problems of survival.  If you know something about this tree-village in the open ocean of the western Pacific please post a comment at the end of this blog page, or email me at dphuey48@gmail.com

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Some of the People - and Me

Chapter 4.   Some of the People

     There have been a lot of fascinating aspects of my experiences in participating in all this marine geology research, not the least of which are the people I have met and worked with.  Let me tell you about some of them, and introduce myself a little more.  The photo here was taken when I was young and just starting out on the Glomar Challenger, I think during Leg 90 in the Tasman Sea.  That is me in the center.  

Working on the drillfloor of the Challenger

On my left is the drill crew chief, called the Toolpusher, the incomparable Howard G.  (last name withheld because I’ve never asked Howard for his permission to publish this and lost touch with him long ago.)  On my right is the driller (one of two on the voyage), Bill N.  We are attempting to assemble for the first time a new coring tool (the Extended Core Barrel).  Howard is holding the assembly instructions I had written myself about 3 months earlier.  It was more complicated than it looks.

     Howard is a proud Cajun from New Iberia, La, or as he will tell you immediately, a coon ass.  If you were casting for a movie of these adventures at sea you couldn’t find an actor any more suited for the role than Howard himself who was a little larger than life.  I’m from Seattle, and to tell the truth it took me a couple weeks to get the rhythm of Howard’s Cajun version of English.  The tattoo visible on his arm, says, “Drink and be merry, for soon we will be dead” (or something pretty close to that).  I have not heard from Howard in years.  I hope he has not succumbed to his own body art prophesy.

     Bill N. is from Jackson, Mississippi.  If anybody is really an oilfield good ol’ boy, then Bill might just be the prototype.  Big, strong, quiet and immensely respected by his crewmates, he is the guy you’d want with you in the proverbial foxhole.  We called him a mile wide and an inch deep.  Not that he wasn’t intelligent or articulate, he just didn’t bother with a lot of philosophical thinking.  Give him a rig crew to run or a week at his deer hunting camp in Mississippi (with a couple cases of liquor) and he was a happy man.  The anecdote at the end of this chapter is the highlight of my experiences with the redoubtable Bill N.

     Most drill crews, on land rigs or on floating drilling vessels, have a similar structure of jobs and job titles.  The pyramid begins at the bottom with the roustabout, some of whom get promoted to roughneck, then derrickman, asst. driller, driller, toolpusher and superintendent.  The titles vary a little and there are numbers of support specialists like electronics technicians, subsea engineers, welders, etc.  On the Challenger and Resolution we added another vital specialty, the Core Techs.  Two on each expedition; these clever guys had to maintain and operate the vast array of specialized coring tools that interfaced with the main drilling apparatus.  Those tools are unique to scientific drilling and the majority of that equipment was invented, fabricated and fielded by the engineering staffs of DSDP and ODP.  The picture at the left shows one of them, Tim M., from I can’t remember which small town in Texas.That is me with the headband, Tim in the hard hat.  Tim had charm, good looks, and a quiet intelligence and sense of humor that snuck up on just about everybody.  His opposite number, Bill L., was big, strong, experienced and assertive.  He hailed from some small town in North Dakota where he claimed it got so cold because there were only two barbed wire fences between there and the North Pole.  Bill had an interesting Navy career at one time, listening in on Russian radio broadcasts from a base in Turkey.  On the opposing crew you would find at one time Pepe, a charming Spaniard who was actually the mayor of his village, when he wasn’t at sea. 



Tim and me (with headband) --- must have
 been on a nice-weather expedition

        The captains of the drillships were invariably memorable figures.  I have introduced Capt. Joe Clarke in an earlier chapter.  He was the reincarnation of Jimmy Cagney and didn’t try to hide it.  He ran away from home to join the Navy when he was a year too young to volunteer at the start of WWII and got himself signed up anyway.  That started a lifelong career at sea that ended with his untimely death of cancer some years ago.  Capt. Clarke had a number of unforgettable characteristics, but two of the most evident that we learned about no matter who you were, were his command of every poem by Robert Service (he could recite “The Cremation of Sam McGee” from memory at any time) and his encyclopedic knowledge of every historical detail of the South Pacific naval campaigns of WWII.  He could tell you the minutia of every battle with the name of every ship and its captain in the US or Japanese navies and often did, whether you were all that interested or not.

     My favorite skipper was Capt. Edwin Oonk., from the Netherlands.  Back to the movie casting analogy, if you called central casting and asked for a commanding ship’s captain type, Capt. Ed would be the first they’d send.  He was stern, competent and absolutely charming if you caught him off duty, but a real commander when he was on the bridge.  My first encounter with Capt. Ed was when I went to Pascagoula, MS, for my first look at the SEDCO/BP 471 drillship, at that time being converted into what would soon become the JOIDES Resolution scientific drillship.  

JOIDES Resolution

One of my colleagues who had been there a week or so before I arrived suggested we go up by the bridge and see if we could catch the captain so I could meet him.  On our way up one of the outside ladders to the bridge deck we heard a roaring voice shouting, with a slight Dutch accent “When I say to get rid of something, I mean GET RID OF IT.”  At that point the watertight door to the bridge banged open, a large booted foot followed, and a junked piece of communications equipment sailed over the bridge rail to the trash heap on the deck below.  My guide took it all in, and said, okay that was your intro to the captain, probably not his best moment.

     Every expedition had its share of old faces and new.  After a few years the marine crews and drilling crews became old friends with only a little turnover.  These fellows came from all over the globe – Texas, Canada, California, North Dakota, Mississippi, Montana, Australia, France, New Zealand, Great Britain.  We actually had a chief engineer from Scotland on the Resolution with the last name of Scott, so obviously he was called Scotty.  He got VERY tired of the Star Trek chief engineer jokes and impersonations -- We’re giving it all we’ve got, Captain, but I don’t think the dilithium crystals will take much more!  ----- You can’t make this stuff up. 

     Even the room stewards were sometimes remarkable.  The first I met on the Challenger was Carlos.  He was so attentive that everyone he took care of had a story about his industriousness.  You could get up in the middle of the night to go to the head and find your bed freshly made when you returned.  After sailing one expedition with Carlos, I did not see him again for a year.  I expected that he had met hundreds of people in the interim and wound never remember me.  At first sight he said, oh sure, nice to see you again, let’s see, you are the one that rarely uses the washcloths.  I visited Carlos one time at his home in New Orleans, an address on Bourbon St, no less.  Too bad it was not during Mardi Gras.

     The science crew was another story because it was typical to get a staff of scientists for a specific voyage that had 2 or 3 familiar faces and everyone else brand new.  And they came from all the partner nations (those countries in the “club” who paid several million dollars per year to participate in the voyages and gain immediate access to all new marine geology research data we acquired).  So they came from all over the globe, North and South America, Europe, Japan, India, Russia, Australia and New Zealand.  Pick a country, if they weren’t employed at a university there it would turn out they’d been born there and emigrated to some other country for their post-graduate education.  On each cruise we had to two Chief Scientists (called co-chiefs), and about two dozen selected specialists in the necessary fields; sedimentology, paleontology, paleomagnetics, geochemistry, petrology, etc.  The photos at left shows a typical group of scientists clustered around the core sampling table in the main lab on the Resolution.



Scientists around the core sampling table
on the Resolution drillship



     On one cruise of mine we had one each co-chief from Australia and New Zealand.  The kiwi co-chief who spent more of his time on the rig floor observing drilling operations had a lovely New Zealand accent.  When he attempted to communicate with our predominately Cajun drill crew he ran into coon ass English he couldn’t understand, and they frankly had trouble catching his kiwi accent as well.  The net result was that I spent way too much time translating (from English to English) after one or other turned to me and asked, What did he say?

A quieter moment extracting samples
from specific cores

     One scientist I will not forget even though we only knew each other for less than an hour.  We were anchored out in the harbor of Valparaiso, Chile, getting ready to start an expedition and awaiting a small boat bringing out a handful of late-arriving scientists.  The boat had been forced to circle the drillship for 45 minutes while some last minute foreign port authorizations were secured.  It was a bit windy and rough, even in the harbor, and the small boat tossed quite a bit before carefully approaching the ship.  By the time the scientists stepped aboard they had had their sea legs thoroughly tested.  Most recovered quickly on the very stable drillship but shortly before we weighed anchor one young lady scientist from Australia who had never sailed with us before came up with a problem.  She was badly ill and was afraid she couldn’t go on the cruise for fear severe seasickness might force us into a medevac to get her off the ship before dehydration became unhealthy for her, or even deadly.  It came to my attention because I was the operations superintendent and senior official onboard from Texas A&M, who were the official leasers of the vessel.  Actually it was the shipboard doctor’s call but he, one the co-chief scientists, and I all put our heads together for this problem.  Probably repeating what she’d already been told, I assured the young lady that things might not be as bad as they seemed.

Me:  Oh, not to worry, this ship is really very stable at sea.  You will be fine.  It was just that small boat ride that got you off to such an uncomfortable start.

Her:  I have only felt worse since coming aboard the drillship.

Me:  Oh.  Well, it would be a shame for you to miss the expedition.  There are lots of anti-seasickness drugs the doctor can give you, like Dramamine or Bonine.

Her:  I took two each of those before I left the hotel in Valparaiso.

Me:  Oh ….  OK, well, there are also scopolamine patches you can wear on your neck.  Some people do very well on them.

Her:  (She pulled back her hair so I could see one patch behind each ear.)

Me:  Ah, I see.  Well, it is a long shot but there are also acupressure cuffs you can wear that put pressure on some parts of your wrists.  I have occasionally known people who got over their acute seasickness problems that way.

Her:   (She rolled up her sleeves to show a cuff on each wrist.)

     I gave up at that point and glanced at the doc who gave me a solemn nod of the head.  Then we escorted the disappointed young lady to the waiting boat for shore.  I hope her career as a marine geologist went successfully after that – without ever having to get on a ship.

Anecdote:  “Suicide is painless (with apologies to MASH)”

     One day while crossing the drill floor of the Challenger during a break in the drilling operations I was spotted and shouted over by three of the rig crew.  Two were new hires, I think summer replacement roughnecks, who were unusual in the business because they both had college degrees.  The third was the amazing Bill N., introduced above.  Bill was outraged and wanted my opinion on something the three of them had been discussing.

Bill:  Have you ever thought of killing yourself?  ‘Cause if you have, you’re as crazy as these clowns. 

Other two:  Wait a minute, that’s not what we said.  We were just talking about thinking of the idea of suicide, not doing it.

Bill to me:  Well, have you ever thought about the “idea of suicide” then?

Me:  Yeah, I guess so.  Just as a concept.  Like what it would take to drive me to do it.  Or how I would do it.  That kind of thing.

Other two:  See …..

Bill:  Then all of you idiots are crazy.  Period.

     At the time Bill was an Asst. Driller with serious ambitions to get that BIG promotion to Driller.  A driller on a rig enjoys a very senior and serious position.  He runs the rig minute by minute, handles all the major drilling controls, directs the activities of the floor hands and others, and literally has the lives of a number of other workers in his hands, because any drill rig can be a deadly place when accidents occur.  One of the driller’s main jobs is to avoid such accidents on his watch.  Only the very best oil field hands who start as roustabouts or roughnecks ever get promoted up through the ranks to driller.  And when they get there they want to keep those jobs.  At that time I was a degreed mechanical engineer about 7 years out of college and was amazed to find out that drillers were typically paid about 3 times as much salary as I was getting.

     On the next expedition where Bill N. sailed he got his promotion to driller.  One day he was deploying drill pipe while one of my colleagues was looking on (I was not aboard for that expedition).  At one point in the highly synchronized activity of running pipe into the ocean at high speed he got careless and made a slight mistake forcing him to slam on the drawworks brake suddenly.  Some minor damage to the derrick equipment occurred causing money-wasting downtime.  Bill was stricken; sure he would be fired or demoted from his dream job.  When all was put right with not-too-much lost time or effort, Bill heaved a huge sigh of relief.  He turned to my colleague and said, “Next time you see Dave tell him I considered suicide.”





Where It All Began

Chapter 3.   Where It All Began – Scientific Ocean Drilling

     Have you ever heard of Project Mohole?  If you are younger than a certain age that name probably rings no bells in your memory.  I first heard of it in my Weekly Reader, the nationally distributed newspaper for elementary school kids.  (I recall also first finding out about Fidel Castro and Sputnik that way.)  Well, Mohole was not the actual start, that distinction more properly goes to the International Geophysical Year, proclaimed by 67 countries as a mutual earth science research initiative for 1957 and 1958.  The Cold War had reached a lull with the death of Joseph Stalin, prosperity and peace reigned in most parts of the world, computer science was emerging in a big way, the space race had begun with the launches of the first Sputnik (USSR) and Explorer (USA) satellites and many eminent science voices in the world decided the time was ripe to expand our knowledge of our planet using new technologies.

     A lot was accomplished during the IGY but it ended quickly and only stimulated the appetite of earth scientists to take even grander steps.  The American Miscellaneous Society (AMSOC), an informal group of scientists, conceived the Mohole Project and successfully lobbied the National Science Foundation for funding.  The plan was to drill through the earth’s crust and sample the upper mantle, something never even remotely conceived possible before.  The earth’s crust varies in thickness around the world but the boundary between crust and mantle is always identifiable in seismic soundings and known as the Mohorovicic Discontinuity, or Moho.  Drilling to the Moho under a continent was far too deep to contemplate but the crust is thinnest under the ocean basins where the highest reaches of the mantle were, it was believed in 1958, to be within reach of the improved drilling technologies of the day.  And of the total drillstring length, the first three-quarters would be easy -- through seawater.

Project Mohole drilling vessel, CUSS-I

     Project Mohole began operations in 1961 and drew a lot of attention, including even an in-person LIFE magazine article by John Steinbeck , who managed to tag along on the first drilling efforts offshore Mexico in the Pacific Ocean.  Deepwater drilling was accomplished from a converted barge with a drilling rig, called CUSS-1, which has a charming history of its own.  The successes and failures of Mohole are stuff of legends but they never managed to reach the mantle before running out of funding and patience from the NSF administrators.  In fact a huge amount of offshore drilling technology was first developed under the auspices of Mohole, where they had to invent a great deal from scratch:  high strength drill pipe, dynamic positioning and heave compensation, to name just a few breakthrough technologies.  The project was abandoned in 1966 with only a little to show for their efforts in terms of actual marine geological samples and data.

     But the idea of drilling under oceans had taken root and would evolve into the next program, the Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP).  The argument put forth was that all that impressive offshore drilling technology that had been developed during Mohole coupled with rapid advances in offshore drilling for oil and gas exploration would make it possible to drill and sample in the deep oceans for a multitude of science objectives.  The difference would be that DSDP would not have a single, blinkered objective of reaching the mantle at one location in the ocean, but would instead make a point of sampling the sediment columns and underlying basement rocks at as many places in the world’s oceans as possible.  This 3-D survey of the crust under the oceans would be mankind’s first opportunity to study actual samples from which enormous science knowledge could be gained.  The sediment column alone carries the historical record of the earth’s climate, creatures, and tectonic activity for the past 200+ million years.  And because most of it lies relatively peacefully under thousands of feet of ocean water the geologic record is not disturbed by the more active forces found on continents – erosion from wind and water, large temperature changes, and active geological process like earthquakes, avalanches, mudslides, and volcanic eruptions.  Actually the active geological processes also occur under the oceans but in many places the sediment column is virtually undisturbed.


Glomar Challenger

     The planners and promoters of DSDP assured that rigorous core sampling of the sediment column and underlying basement rocks would be the prime objective and obtainable using technology already available on the market.  The key piece of the technology was a then-modern drillship, like the 392-ft long Glomar Challenger.  The NSF agreed (somewhat reluctantly, it is said) because they still felt a little stung by the cost overruns suffered duriing Project Mohole, in which they believed scientific enthusiasm had overshadowed common sense and good engineering judgment.

     With proper goals and cautions put in place by NSF funders, in 1966 the DSDP signed a contract for scientific conversion of a Global Marine drillship, just beginning construction.  The Phase I arrangement called for outfitting of the Glomar Challenger plus 18 months of scientific offshore drilling operations beginning in 1968.  Success of the initial Legs lead to more confidence and Phase 2 was funded by the NSF for 30 more months of drilling operations, plus onshore support.  Before the program ended incremental program extensions of a few years at a time lasted until 1984.  Funding was from NSF at first but were supplemented by monies from partner nations in later years as success bread success on the international geoscience level.

     Initial scientific successes of the Challenger voyages were profound including discovery of salt domes in the Gulf of Mexico (today exploited as traps for a lot of petroleum reserves) and proof of seafloor spreading in the mid-Atlantic Ocean.  The debates over the theories of continental drift and seafloor spreading had raged for decades without final resolution until Challenger crews recovered core samples convincingly settling the argument.

     In the early 1980’s DSDP and global scientific drilling in general faced a crossroads.  Many competitors for the scientific funds called for a new direction, i.e. use the science money for something else; drilling the oceans was well advanced.  Scripps Institution of Oceanography, host of DSDP, was losing some interest as their leaders no longer saw ocean drilling as the kind of leading edge science they wanted for Scripps.  Others declared that the Challenger was nearing the end of its useful life and that much more sophisticated drillships were now commonplace.  At the end of a lot of politicking, lobbying and scientific conferences the Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) was born.  ODP was to be based at Texas A&M University, a most enthusiastic and willing new host institution.  Funds were to be provided to lease and convert a newer, more modern drillship and a contract was signed for 5 years of operations at sea in pursuit of marine geology research.  At the time ODP began some critics looked at the 96 voyages of DSDP and asked, Hasn’t the floor of the oceans been pretty well surveyed and sampled by now?  By the end of DSDP operations 624 sites spread across all the oceans of the world had been occupied and drilled.  If those sites were to be superimposed on a map of the United States and distributed evenly it would average out to 12-1/2 drill sites per state.  Imagine trying to characterize all of the geology of, say, Montana or Michigan with samples from only 12 sites.

JOIDES Resolution

     ODP kicked off in 1984 with transfer of 20 key personnel from DSDP in San Diego to ODP temporary offices in College Station, TX.  I was one of those people.  At about the same time a survey and competition for the new drillship was completed with the selection of the Sedco/BP 471, a modern 470-ft drillship that had only just been put into oil and gas service, which was offered by Sedco to Texas A&M at an attractive lease rate.  The ship was sent to a yard for extensive work to convert it to a scientific drillship complete with upgraded drill string and heave compensator and a 7-story built in lab stack (including even a scanning electron microscope).  The ship’s drilling crews were trained on the use of the unfamiliar science coring equipment and the A&M personnel learned the details of the big new vessel.  In January 1985 the new ship, unofficially re-christened as JOIDES Resolution set sail on the first ODP leg from Miami, Florida after a brief, successful sea trial.  The drilling expeditions of the Resolution continue to this day, 28 years later, with almost no interruptions.  DSDP plus ODP (later IODP) have been proven to be two of the most productive and cost effective major science research programs in history.



Map of Drill Sites for DSDP, ODP and IODP


 For some interesting historical references, see:

International Geophysical Year

http://celebrating200years.noaa.gov/magazine/igy/welcome.html#long

Project Mohole, DSDP and ODP History – Ocean Leadership article http://www.oceanleadership.org/2011/celebrating-the-50th-anniversary-of-project-mohole/

Life Magazine article by John Steinbeck, Project Mohole

http://books.google.fr/books?id=9lEEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA110&ots=iFqfSHZdb0&dq=John%20Steinbeck%201961%20crust%20pacific%20life&pg=PA110%23v=twopage&q&f=false#v=onepage&q&f=false

Deep Sea Drilling Project

http://www.deepseadrilling.org/about.htm

http://iodp.tamu.edu/publicinfo/glomar_challenger.html

ODP/IODP     http://iodp.tamu.edu/

 Here is an anecdote that is just a bit spooky:

“Be Careful Who You Meet at Sea”

     At the end of a Resolution expedition drilling around the Bahamas in 1985 we were headed back to the final port of call in Miami sailing in the normal sea channels between the islands.  The area at the time (maybe still to this day) was rife with seagoing drug smugglers.  The US Coast Guard maintains visual surveillance of the area and we routinely spotted their P-3 Orion spotter aircraft passing by overhead at low altitude.  Nothing unusual about any of this until our captain received a radio call from the Coast Guard plane asking if we could assist in a vessel-in-distress situation.  The problem was a small craft with fishermen out of Miami that had run out of fuel and was adrift in one of the Bahamian shipping channels.  They needed gasoline, could we provide any?  Our captain explained that we would be glad to help but that we were a diesel-powered vessel with no more than a few gallons of gasoline on hand.

     While this information was being chewed over another vessel jumped into the radio conversation.  They explained they were a private sailboat with a good supply of gasoline, but could also operate on diesel if necessary.  They would give up their gasoline to the vessel-in-distress if we could first load them up with a tankful of diesel fuel.  This seemed like a good plan so we gave the sailboat crew our coordinates and hove-to to wait for them.  The sailboat crew turned out to be a quite young man and wife on a see-the-world cruise in a 36-ft sloop.  By the time they came alongside the drillship and took on their full load of diesel darkness was beginning to fall.  We did not know if they could easily find the drifting vessel-in-distress.  And since we had a faster cruise speed we offered to go on ahead, find the drifting boat, and standby with our derrick lights turned on (200-ft high) for them to use as a navigational aid.

    The good part began when we found the drifting boat.  It was a small, open runabout with twin high horsepower outboards.  Barely big enough to be a couple miles offshore and very out of place in this remote stretch of the Bahamas.  And its crew was right out of central casting for an episode of Miami Vice – two Cuban-looking dudes in tight pants, silk shirts and gold chains.  As soon as our enormous drillship with all lights blazing pulled up alongside they went into a frenzy dumping suspicious-looking black plastic bags over the side, in full view of the 60 or 70 crewmembers on our ship who wanted to see and photograph the show.  We quickly decided that not only would we wait for the young couple on the sailboat, but that we’d hang around until the refueling operation was complete and the sailboat was safely on its way.

     And here is the spooky part.  During all of the time we were standing by the drifting speedboat  there was another vessel silently circling us at about a mile or two away.  This boat was a virtual Onassis luxury yacht.  Large, sleek and very expensive looking.  But it would not answer any radio hail, even when the Coast Guard plane “ordered” it to respond or stand in violation of various maritime laws requiring all vessels to render assistance in cases of emergency at sea.  It didn’t communicate and did not leave the scene, just cruised slowly around us all at a range too far to see any people on board.  We could never make out any name or registration markings.  Very eerie.  

    Eventually the silk-shirt “fishermen” got their load of gasoline, never said a word to us, never tried to recover their lost packages dropped over the side and took off in a hurry.  The sailboat couple thanked us for our assistance and departed on their own itinerary.  The Coast Guard plane gave up trying to raise the mystery yacht on the radio, thanked us and flew off.  As we departed the area the silent yacht was still to be seem lurking around, maybe looking for floating garbage bags, maybe getting ready to chase down the incompetent drug smugglers in the high-powered outboard runabout. 

     I never had a good feeling about the future for those two desperados.  Their twin outboards probably gave them enough speed to outrun the luxury yacht and any lurking Coast Guard cutter, assuming calm seas, but would their new supply of gas give them enough range to reach safety?  And is any place safe when you screw up a drug deal that badly?