A new partnership between Ocean Networks Canada and the Canadian Consortium for Ocean Drilling ensures Canada’s membership in the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) continues until 2023, with the support and participation of 10 Canadian universities as well as Natural Resources Canada.

For over 50 years, IODP drilling expeditions have led to many fundamental breakthroughs in the understanding of our oceans, climate, and Earth evolution, including significant leaps in our understanding of plate tectonics, climate change, circulation of fluids through Earth’s crust, the limits of life on and within Earth. To date, Canadian researchers have published over 800 articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals based on data collected during IODP expeditions. The program also builds intellectual capacity through the promotion of international collaboration, education, and training, including workshops and summer schools.

Drill cores, borehole imaging, observatory data, and related geophysical imaging are obtained from beneath the ocean floor using specialized drill ships like the JOIDES Resolution pictured above. (Photo: William Crawford, IODP/TAMU)

One of ONC’s deep-sea networks extends across the Juan de Fuca Plate, which has been a hot-spot of scientific ocean drilling since 1991. Several of the boreholes drilled in the Northeast Pacific are equipped with CORKs (Circulation Obviation Retrofit Kit) hydrologic observatories that enable geoscientists to observe changes in subsurface pressures and temperatures caused by earthquakes, storms, hydrothermal convection, and regional tectonic plate strain.

Ocean Networks Canada provides live connections to CORKs at Cascadia Basin and Clayoquot Slope, with future demonstrations planned using the CORK at Cascadia Basin to monitor the safe injection and mineralization of CO2 into sub-seafloor basalt as a future negative emissions solution to climate change.

John Jamieson, the Chair of the Canadian Consortium for Ocean Drilling, is a member of Ocean Networks Canada’s Ocean Observatory Council. He holds a Canada Research Chair in Marine Geology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. (Photo: William Crawford, IODP/TAMU)

For more information on the Canadian Consortium for Ocean Drilling, and IODP can be found at www.iodpcanada.ca.