Density of Oceanic Crust
Certain properties of a substance are both distinctive and relatively easy to determine. Density, the ratio between a sample’s mass and…
Core Understanding: Description and Lithostratigraphy
The shipboard sedimentologists are responsible for describing the lithology and stratigraphy of sediments and sedimentary rocks that are recovered by…
Antarctica and Neogene Global Climate Change
In this chapter you will build basic geographic and geologic knowledge of Antarctica and use geologic reasoning. In Part 11.1, you will…
Core Section Curation
Upon recovery from the drill floor, each section of a core must be identified and catalogued. A detailed curation system…
Drilling Rates through Oceanic Crust
Composition, structure, fracturing, and other factors may influence the length of time required for drilling through oceanic crust. The drilling…
A Tale of Two Teeth
This lesson is a storytelling activity—a story that has characters (including a villain), a series of mysteries (starting with unexplained…
An Expedition to the Seafloor
The goal of the Deep Sea Drilling Project was to investigate the sediments and rocks beneath the deep oceans by…
The Race is On…with Seafloor Spreading
Seafloor spreading is one component of the theory of plate tectonics. At mid-ocean ridges in many of the world’s oceans, new…
The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) in Review
Since 1968, scientific ocean drilling has tapped into a considerable archive of Earth history, and in doing so has revealed…
Continents and Currents
During World War II, an American attack transport captain, named Harry Hess, noticed that the size of submarine volcanoes became…