Dismantling the Ship That Drilled for the Ocean’s Deepest Secrets

A global cataclysm is portrayed in black and white in the sediments off the southeastern coast of the United States. Deep below the seafloor, chalky muds evince an ancient ocean flourishing with life. But a stark black layer cuts through the pale grains, marking the moment 66 million years ago when a six-mile wide asteroid slammed into Earth and our planet was never the same. The impact, known as the Chicxulub event, set off dramatic climate swings that sent 75 percent of Earth’s species — including all non-avian dinosaurs — spiraling toward extinction.

Many details of the devastation come from cores — long tubes of sediment or rock that result from drilling into the seafloor — that were hauled onboard the JOIDES Resolution. The ship, known to those who sailed on it as the J.R., was the only dedicated American scientific drill ship. Drill cores from the ship and its predecessor also helped confirm the theory of plate tectonics, which shapes our planet’s surface. They provide records of climate change throughout Earth’s history. They unveiled microbes thriving far deeper beneath Earth’s surface than ever thought possible.

Yet the J.R. returned from its last expedition earlier this month, and crews removed its crucial scientific equipment.

There’s no concrete plans for its replacement. The ship’s fate was announced last year by the federally funded National Science Foundation, which financed most of the J.R.’s operations. The foundation cited rising costs and a lack of international support to meet the funding gap.

“It was a punch in the gut,” said Beth Christensen, a marine geologist at Rowan University in New Jersey.

The J.R., which has been managed by Texas A&M University, has long been the workhorse of the International Ocean Discovery Program, a 21-nation collaboration supporting the study of Earth’s history and dynamics.

“This is the program that provides the sediments and the rocks that we use to understand our world, and to have that go away is absolutely unbelievable,” Dr. Christensen said. To illustrate how much we’ve learned, she proposed taking an introductory Earth science textbook and highlighting every concept advanced or discovered through ocean drilling by the J.R. and other vessels. “I’m probably going to run out of ink,” she said.

But with the underlying agreement set to lapse this year and the ship’s environmental certification soon to expire, the National Science Foundation contends that retiring the JOIDES Resolution is necessary to devote resources to plotting the future of U.S. ocean drilling. “We do not anticipate that this is the end of ocean drilling and ocean drilling-related research,” said James McManus, the foundation’s division director for ocean science.

One option for continued work is contracting commercial or academic vessels for one-off expeditions, which would be supported by a proposed coordination office funded by the foundation. But many researchers are wary of that option.

“There are going to be many fewer of these kinds of expeditions, no matter how well-intentioned N.S.F. is in doing this,” said Keir Becker, an emeritus professor of marine geosciences at the University of Miami, who has been part of ocean expeditions since 1979.

Uncertainty for ocean drilling loomed large as the J.R. docked for its last expedition under the International Ocean Discovery Program on Aug. 2.

“Everyone was still kind of hoping there’d be some Hail Mary right at the end,” said Kristen St. John, one of the leaders of the expedition and a marine sedimentologist at James Madison University in Virginia. Instead of salvation, a small greeting party that included technicians tasked with stripping the J.R. of its usually permanent scientific equipment waited onshore. Dr. St. John described warring emotions as she disembarked: pride in the team’s recent success mingled with the sobering reality of the program’s end.

Originally built for oil exploration, the J.R. entered scientific service in 1985, and has since recovered some 230 miles of rock and sediment cores at more than a thousand sites around the world. The 470-foot-long ship was one of three types of drilling vessels used since 2003 under the international collaboration. The second is Chikyu, which is operated by the Japanese government, though the ship seldom leaves the country’s waters. The third option is to rely on academic or commercial vessels contracted on a one-off basis, organized through European partners.

Yet in the last two decades, some 75 percent of all of the program’s expeditions have been onboard the J.R. “It’s the sweet spot of size, capability and costs for operations,” said Samantha Bova, a paleo-oceanographer at San Diego State University. “There’s nothing else like it.”

More than a ship, the J.R. was a floating laboratory equipped with instruments and technicians that helped scientists analyze cores as they’re hauled from the deep. Teams worked in 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, and sometimes spent months at sea. That knitted tight bonds among scientists, techs and crew members, and fostered collaborations across fields, career stages and country borders. The setup was like a reactor for scientific discovery and an incubator for young scientists. “The ship becomes its own world,” said Harold Tobin, a geoscientist at the University of Washington.

Buoyed by these efforts, the United States has long led scientific ocean drilling worldwide. But now, said Stephen Pekar, a geologist at Queens College in New York, “We just gave it up.”

China’s new drill ship Mengxiang sailed on its first voyage in December 2023. While working on the J.R.’s final expedition, several drill crew members received job offers to work on the Chinese ship. Its technical potential rivals that of the J.R., but the prospects for collaboration with China remain uncertain.

There are small glimmers of hope. For one, the National Science Foundation will continue to fund three core repositories under the international partnership at Texas A&M, the University of Bremen in Germany and Kochi University in Japan. Each institution houses libraries of drill cores collected from around the world that can continue to fuel research. In July, the foundation also tasked a new subcommittee to evaluate the requirements of a new drill ship to meet key scientific needs. If funded, however, the project would take at least a decade or more, according to Dr. McManus.

Scientists are cautioning against complacency. “We still need the community to be advocating strongly that this asset is critical to science in the U.S. and elsewhere,” said Dr. Bova, who is a member of the subcommittee.

Indeed, ocean rocks and sediments are often unappreciated secret keepers of our planet’s past. Many seafloor samples hold information not available on land. For example, glacial ice cores have illuminated up to 800,000 years of Earth’s climate. But ocean sediments extended that record back millions more years. The cores drilled through the international program have “basically written the book when it comes to past climate changes,” Dr. Pekar said.

Ocean drilling also allows the study of mega-earthquakes, many of which happen offshore in subduction zones, where one tectonic plate plunges beneath another. For example, instruments installed in seafloor drill holes, called borehole observatories, measure subtle subterranean shifts like “a stethoscope on the fault,” Dr. Tobin said.

The data from such observatories could help reveal signs that forewarn of devastating earthquakes. Dr. Tobin leads a proposal to install more borehole observatories off the Pacific Northwest coast. The retirement of the J.R. complicates the work, though Dr. Tobin says he is determined to find opportunities with the National Science Foundation or other sources of funding.

While new possibilities take shape, however, scientists fear that the end of J.R. expeditions will scatter most of the program’s talented staff, including technicians and drill crew. Through the generations, they’ve perfected drilling methods and developed new tools to optimize sample recovery. “We’re always looking to improve,” said Lisa Crowder, a laboratory officer with the program. After 45 expeditions and nearly 24 years, her last day will be in March 2025.

Lengthy tenure was common among ship staff, who helped guide the scientists while at sea, Dr. St. John says. Their expertise especially was on display when problems arose.

On the expedition Dr. St. John co-led this summer, several sediment cores exploded, their plastic tubes blasting apart. The cause soon was discovered: An unexpected excess of gas pressurized the cores as they were pulled from the deep. The techs and the crew quickly adapted, drilling shorter cores to allow for expansion. To prevent possible blasts from turning the tubes into plastic projectiles, they began wrapping the cores in Kevlar blankets as they were pulled from the metal drill pipe. Then they swiftly drilled holes in the clear plastic wherever gas collected to relieve the pressure. Gas hissed from the cores, occasionally shooting mud many feet into the air.

“They did a phenomenal job,” Dr. St. John said. Crew, technicians and scientists onboard all play different but essential roles, she added. “So much of scientific research — especially scientific ocean drilling research — happens behind the scenes.”

Yet the triumph was bittersweet, said Renata Giulia Lucchi, a leader of the expedition and a sedimentologist at the National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics in Italy. As the team wrapped up, she spotted a simple mark on one of the ship’s whiteboards that left a pit in her stomach. Technicians used the whiteboard to track details about cores hauled on the ship. Under the grid of numbers, a trio of three-letter codes marked the end of a drill hole, the end of the site and the end of the expedition: E.O.H., E.O.S. and E.O.X. But when the last core was brought up onto the J.R., a new mark appeared not seen in the ship’s nearly 40-year journey.

At the bottom of the board, inked in blue, were three additional letters, E.O.P.: “End of program.”