Drilling under Antarctic Ocean

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33092, 6 December 1972, Page 24

Drilling under Antarctic Ocean

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter— Copyright) SAN DIEGO (California), Dec. 4. The United States deep-sea drilling ship Glomar Challenger will make the first investigation in history of the floor beneath the Antarctic Ocean in the coming months.

The research vessel will leave Fremantle, Australia, late in December to spend the next two months taking core samples from the earth’s crust on the bottom of the ocean near the bottom of the world. The ship is due to return from the Antarctic in February, when it will dock at Lyttelton, New Zealand. BIG PROGRAMME The Antarctic probe will comprise the twenty-eighth leg of the Glomar Challenger’s expeditions, which were started in 1968 to learn how the earth was formed. The United States Government is financing the sevenyear project at a cost of about ss7m. . , . The Scripps Institution of Oceanography, based in San Diego, is directing the investigation of the world’s oceans, and oceanic scientists from Australia, the Soviet Union, Switzerland, and Italy are participating in tUrn ' MAIN PURPOSE “The programme is aimed basically at making the broadest possible reconnaissance survey of the ocean basins,” said Dr William Neirenberg. director of Scripps and co-pnncipal investigator of the deep-sea drilling project. “The basic understanding thus obtained about the history and origin of oceanic basins and continents and of the processes that led to theii formation and modificatior should ultimately make posOre loading.— The Japan ese ore carrier Nichiho Mari vas loading the last of 47,001 tons of ironsand at Taharo; yesterday and is expected t< leave for Japan this evening The production manager o N.Z. Steel, Ltd (Mr A Hedges) said all systems hac worked well during the thin load at the company’s offshore buoy.—(P.A.).

sible the economic exploitation of the oceans for the good will of all mankind.” In the first four years of the project, the Glomar Challenger pushed its drill through millions of feet of water at 249 sites in the Gulf of Mexico, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. The drill, working to 4264 feet beneath the ocean floor,

brought up sediment cores amounting to more than 24 miles. ■The oceans are young in comparison with the continents, the deep-sea drilling project has learned. The oldest-dated rock recovered from beneath the oceans is about 160 m years old, compared with 3600 m years for the oldest-dated continental rock.