Policy-Related Text Blocks in the 2050 Science Framework
IMPACT. High-density, global scientific ocean drilling networks and transects will enable a more robust identification of feedbacks and tipping points in Earth's climate system and improve modeling and IPCC assessments of climate sensitivity to atmospheric greenhouse gases, ocean circulation changes, and other geologic boundary conditions. (p. 10)
IMPACT. Deep scientific ocean drilling will provide a pathway to Earth's deep interior where the rocks contain fundamental information on Earth's formation and evolution, geodynamic behavior, and the interrelationship between geological, geochemical, and climate cycles. (p. 10)
IMPACT. By directly accessing, sampling, instrumenting, and monitoring dangerous offshore and nearshore fault zones worldwide, scientific ocean drilling will enable more reliable forecasts and assessments of the risks to vulnerable populations and infrastructure posed by subduction zone earthquakes and tsunamis and will facilitate improved hazard preparedness and response. . (p. 11)
IMPACT. By diagnosing ocean health through geologic time, scientific ocean drilling will help inform society about drivers in the Earth system that regulate ocean health, the warning signs of decline, and how long it may take for the ocean to recover from perturbations. . (p. 11)
IMPACT. Scientific ocean drilling will significantly advance understanding of the rules of life, the limits of life, and the origins and evolution of life on Earth. It also offers the opportunity to establish what life might look like in analogous environments on other worlds and what new organisms and novel biological functions useful in geobiotechnology reside in Earth's subseafloor. (p. 11).
Widely recognized as a preeminent training ground for the next generation of Earth scientists, scientific ocean drilling will capitalize on its international, cross-disciplinary shipboard and shore-based science parties to advance participation of traditionally underrepresented groups. Using a variety of social media and web-based platforms, data and results will be broadly disseminated to educators, policymakers, and the public, securing scientific ocean drilling's position as the authoritative source of information about the Earth system. (p. 12)
Future collaborations between international space agencies and scientific ocean drilling will benefit efforts to better understand planetary evolution and structure and to assess the potential for life elsewhere in the solar system and beyond. Such collaborations will also enhance understanding of the hazards posed by past extraterrestrial impacts and the recovery of life after such events. Perhaps most importantly, integration of modern satellite data with historic paleoclimate records from scientific ocean drilling will be a powerful new approach to understanding Earth's interconnected processes today and climate evolution into the future. (p. 12)
Scientific ocean drilling provides access to subseafloor environments and biosphere communities to investigate the conditions and processes that were required to develop and maintain a habitable world and understand how it evolved. Scientific ocean drilling provides access to subseafloor environments and biosphere communities to investigate the conditions and processes that were required to develop and maintain a habitable world and understand how it evolved. (p. 15)
Scientific ocean drilling reaches otherwise inaccessible habitats of the deep biosphere to investigate how environmental conditions directly influence the distribution, diversity, and survival strategies of microbial life in subseafloor environments. (p. 16)
Scientific ocean drilling is a key tool for exploring the environmental history of these events in human origins, with direct implications for the habitability and life on and in the terrestrial Earth. (p. 19)
By targeting how the climate system operates across a wide array of past climate states, scientific ocean drilling will obtain the data necessary to calibrate and improve numerical models used to project future climate impacts and inform mitigation strategies. (p. 30)
Scientific ocean drilling can provide the basic data needed for a global synthesis of monsoon variations across tectonic, orbital, and millennial timescales. (p. 37)
The need is pressing for scientific ocean drilling to deliver high-quality "ice proximal" records that document past times of ice sheet collapse, capture major changes in ocean and atmospheric circulation, and test and improve models that project future sea level rise. (p. 39)
Scientific ocean drilling can also help elucidate the role gas hydrates may play in initiating instability on the continental slopes with the potential for landslide hazards. (p. 45)
Understanding the role plankton ecology plays in buffering surface ocean pH and in carbon sequestration is of critical importance as we seek to determine the future response of the marine biosphere to ongoing anthropogenic changes. (p. 45)
These records can elucidate the environmental conditions when tipping points were crossed, the rates at which the Earth system built up to tipping points, how long it took for the system to attain a new stable state, and how the new state differed from the previous one. Lessons learned from the geological past can help us understand why certain Earth system components have tipping points and not others, how exceeding tipping points affects ecosystem function, and what drives species to extinction. Identifying tipping points before Earth exceeds them will provide the information society needs to decide how to address today's changing climate. (p. 48)
Scientific ocean drilling provides the globally distributed samples needed to determine changes in climate system parameters—such as atmospheric CO2 levels and the amount of ice loss—that caused the cryosphere to tip to new states in the past. (p. 55)
Scientific ocean drilling provides an opportunity to understand the distribution of hydrates, how they respond to environmental change, and how they fit into the global carbon cycle and climate system. (p. 63)
Scientific ocean drilling will play an important role in exploring opportunities for submarine CO2 sequestration, as these potential offshore carbon reservoirs require deep coring capabilities and improved drilling/ logging technologies. (p. 63)
Scientific ocean drilling can help close knowledge gaps by installing subseafloor observatories to monitor in situ conditions before, during, and after hazardous events and by probing the stratigraphic record of prehistoric submarine and terrestrial hazardous events to understand processes and evaluate longterm magnitude-frequency correlations. (p. 65)
Submarine earthquakes and landslides, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, and other extreme events all leave behind evidence in submarine rocks and sediments. Scientific ocean drilling provides the means to access this record and to go well beyond the short temporal record provided by shallow piston and long coring. (p. 67)
Scientific ocean drilling offers an opportunity to assess hazard variations over time through installation of offshore subseafloor observatories inside or very near faults, at and around landslide failure planes, and at volcanoes. (p. 69)
Scientific ocean drilling has the opportunity to both use and drive advances in offshore technology and revolutionize science-based assessment of natural hazards in the marine environment. (p. 71)
High-density, global scientific ocean drilling networks and transects will enable a more robust identification of feedbacks and tipping points in Earth's climate system and improve modeling and IPCC assessments of climate sensitivity to atmospheric greenhouse gases, ocean circulation changes, and other geologic boundary conditions. (p. 73)
The historical knowledge gained from examining sedimentary archives will inform society about the rates of change in and
irreversibility of some Earth system processes such as ice sheet collapse and permafrost thawing, permitting informal assessment of mitigation and adaptation measures. (p. 74)
Knowledge gained from studying past climates recorded in sediments recovered by scientific ocean drilling provides valuable benchmarks for testing climate models. (p. 74)
Scientific ocean drilling data remain instrumental in identifying the magnitude of polar amplification and model-data mismatches in IPCC assessment reports. (p. 75)
Such data will permit better evaluation of the implications to society of increased climate variability and whether this variability is likely to become more energized or altered under a warmer-than-present, high CO2 climate state. (p. 77)
The potential earthquake, tsunami, and landslide hazards of many of the world's subduction zones are poorly known, as many of the large events have no historic record due to their long recurrence intervals. Scientific ocean drilling will significantly advance the study of the plate interface where mega-earthquakes nucleate, as it can directly access, sample, instrument, and monitor these dangerous offshore and nearshore fault zones. Advancing our understanding of the earthquake and tsunami potential of tectonic plate boundaries worldwide will enable more reliable forecasts of the risks posed to vulnerable populations and infrastructure and improve hazard preparedness and response. (p. 84)
Scientific ocean drilling can provide a sustained subseafloor observational presence through installation of networks of borehole observatories in numerous fault zones around the globe. (p. 85)
Scientific ocean drilling will advance understanding of the key factors that generate large earthquakes and tsunamis, as it provides the only way to directly access, sample, and instrument major offshore fault zones. Such an effort will contribute important information about how some of the world's largest and most active undersea faults work and ultimately will improve hazard preparedness and response (p. 87)
Scientific ocean drilling will offer a diagnosis of ocean health through geologic time that will in turn inform society about the expected rates, durations, and magnitudes of future ocean health deterioration. (p. 88)
Scientific ocean drilling will expand its high-resolution sediment archives to permit increased understanding of the future health, abundance, functioning, and resilience of marine ecosystems on a warmer and ice-free planet. (p. 91)
Deep-time reef records targeted by scientific ocean drilling can show us how long-lasting global warming can flip ecosystems such as coral reefs to an alternate state for millions of years. (p. 92)
A sustained drilling effort will significantly advance understanding of the rules of life, the limits of life, and the origins and evolution of life on Earth. It also offers the opportunity to establish what life might look like in analogous environments on other worlds and what new organisms and novel biological functions useful in geobiotechnology reside in Earth's subseafloor. (p. 93)
By studying the life that inhabits extreme subseafloor environments, we will gain insight into the potential adaptations of primordial life, the constraints under which it evolved, and hence the origin of life on Earth. (p. 94)
The quest to understand the origins, diversification, and evolutionary processes of life on Earth and the pursuit of life on other worlds are challenges of the first order. Advancement of such shared interests between the scientific ocean drilling and space science communities requires identification of the best subseafloor analogues to extraterrestrial habitats. We will team with space agencies to design and test tools and to formulate criteria that will best assess biosignatures and aid in understanding habitability in Earth's subseafloor and on other worlds. (p. 97)
These records are needed to ground truth, and thus improve, global climate forecasts. They will also be used to test more refined hypotheses about the rates of change in temperature and sea levels as our climate warms and to pinpoint tipping points in the climate system. (p. 100)
These studies will lead to a better understanding of the limits of life on Earth and the potential for life elsewhere in the universe. Simultaneously, discoveries of new species within the subseafloor biosphere may offer opportunities to develop novel pharmaceuticals (p. 100)
Cores recovered by scientific ocean drilling will provide baseline information about the abundance and diversity of microscopic organisms living in the pre-Anthropocene ocean. Comparing these data to contemporary responses of the ocean-biosphere system to changes in greenhouse gas emissions, nutrient levels, weathering, and the exploitation of marine organisms will contribute to projections of the ocean's future health and habitability. (p. 100)
Because scientific ocean drilling covers and integrates so many science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) areas, the possibilities for developing successful programs and relationships are immense. (p. 102)
The scientific ocean drilling community will use the same successful approaches for achieving gender parity to enhance overall diversity and inclusion. (p. 103)
Earth's ocean basins provide a reference frame for exploring challenging environments and offer a natural laboratory for testing remote and space exploration robotic technologies. Integration of modern satellite data with historic records from scientific ocean drilling will be a powerful new approach to understanding Earth's interconnected processes today and climate evolution into the future. (p. 108)
As we continue to observe the many far-reaching environmental changes, decision-makers will need to increasingly rely on model-based scenarios of future climate to inform planning. Climate models require robust baseline data of global climate evolution over extended geologic time periods to test model performance. For example, satellite observations paired with long climate histories obtained from scientific ocean drill cores will allow us to test different assumptions used in physical and dynamic models of Earth's climate system, as well as define boundary conditions and recognize potential tipping points. (p. 109)
By investigating the continuum from no life to life on Earth, scientific ocean drilling can provide a more holistic picture of the requirements for biochemical functioning of life and planetary habitability. Such knowledge will inform the search for life elsewhere in the universe and help identify the best candidates for extraterrestrial exploration. (p. 110)
The perspectives of scientific ocean drilling and space agencies regarding the Earth system are complementary, presenting opportunities for mutually beneficial collaborations. Partner organizations will benefit by combining technical strengths to better recognize, extract, and preserve life signatures in extreme environments on Earth and other planets; by telling a unified story about how the Earth system functions; and by training the next generation of researchers to think in a fully interdisciplinary fashion (p. 111)
Read the full 2050 Framework for Scientific Ocean Drilling.