Ocean Drilling Program: Results From Eighth Year Of Drilling Operations
Authors: Rabinowitz P.D. , Francis T.J.G. , Baldauf J.G. , Coyne John , Harding B.W. , McPherson R.G. , Merrill R.B. , Olivas R.E. 
Published: October 2008

Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) has completed 46 internationally staffed expeditions and eight years of scientific ocean drilling in search of answers relating to the tectonic evolution of passive and active continental margins, origin and evolution of oceanic crust, origin and evolution of marine sedimentary sequences, and pale oceanography. To address these problems, ODP has made numerous advances in technology for retrieval of continuous undisturbed cores under hostile environmental conditions. ODP curates over 172.87 km of cored material and associated scientific data bases and publishes resultsof the scientific expeditions in a continuous series of Proceedings volumes.

During its eighth year, ODP has completed pioneering scientific and technical exploration in the Pacific Ocean, Leg 141 was in the Chile Triple Junction region, and focused on the effects of ridge-crest subduction Leg 142, the third ODP engineering cruise tested amongst other new technology, the diamond coring system, Phase IB, on the East Pacific Rise. Legs 143 and 144 were an integrated campaign of drilling Cretaceous reef-bearing guyots of the Western Pacific, with the objective of usingthem as monitors of relative sea-level changes and thereby of the combined effects of the tectonic subsidence (and uplift) history of the seamounts and of global fluctuations of sea level. Leg 145 in the North Pacific

Ocean studied high-resolution variations of surface and deep-water circulation and chemistry during the eogene, the late Cretaceous and Cenozoic history of atmospheric circulation, ocean chemistry, and continental climate, and the age and nature of the seafloor. Leg 146 studied the relationship between fluid flow and tectonics in the accretionary wedge formed at the Cascadia convergent plate boundary off Vancouver and Oregon Future cruises include, amongst others, Leg 147 to understand igneous, tectonic and metamorphic evolution of fast spreading oceanic crust and to understand the processes of rifting in young ocean crust. Leg 148 will deepen Hole 504B, the deepest hole we have beneathseafloor (2000 mbsf) in order to penetrate the oceanic Layer 3. Leg 149 will commence an Atlantic Ocean campaign with coring on the rifted margin of the Iberian Abyssal Plain in order to study its subsidence history and the age and nature of the ocean-continent transition. Leg 150 will consist of a transect of sites off New Jersey inorder to study late Oligocene through Miocene sea level changes. Leg 151 in the Norwegian-Greenland Sea will investigate the high northern latitude oceansâ??, role in global climate and ocean systems. Leg 152 will investigate deformation of the lithosphere on the East Greenland margin. Legs 153 to 158 will continue our campaign of Atlantic Ocean exploration by coring near the Kane Fracture Zone (Leg 153), the Ceara Rise (Leg 154), the Amazon Fan (Leg 155), the North Barbados Ridge (Leg 156), the Vema Fracture Zone (Leg 157), and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge - TAG area (Leg 158).

This paper focuses on ODP'S scientific and technicalachievements during its eighth year of field operations and discusses areas of future study,