The environmental "time capsules" stored in Ireland's Atlantic deepwater corals and carbonate mounds will be the focus for an international geoscientific project involving one of the world's largest research vessels later this month.
The 143-metre Joides Resolution docks in Dublin port next Wednesday to take two Irish-based scientists on board before heading out west to the flanks of the Porcupine Basin. During the Dublin stopover, scientists from the International Ocean Drilling Programme (IODP) will also brief Minister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources Noel Dempsey on the details of the research project.
Deepwater corals and carbonate mounds formed over thousands of years off the Irish west coast have been mapped by the State's €32 million National Seabed Survey. The environmental protection of same has been the subject of work by Dr Anthony Grehan and colleagues at NUI, Galway's Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences. The mounds have grown over hundreds of thousand, perhaps millions, of years with microbial mats binding coral and sediment to build structures which can be up to 180 metres high.
A Franco-Irish expedition using the French research ship, Atalante, yielded some of the first graphic images in August 2001, and a further international expedition in 2003 confirmed that 60 per cent of European deepwater corals lay off this coastline.
The IODP is an international research programme, involving the EU, Japan and North America, which explores the history and structure of the earth as recorded in sea-floor sediments and rocks. It aims to build on work carried out by the previous international projects which examined global phenomena such as climate change through ocean-basin exploration.
The concept dates back to the late 1960s, when it suggested (in a project still to be realised) that researchers should drill a hole through the seven kilometres of ocean crust into the earth's mantle.
The European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling (ECORD) represents European involvement in the IODP, and it undertakes drilling projects in its own right. Last year, for instance, an ECORD initiative recovered cores from beneath the Arctic which document the global climatic transition from greenhouse conditions 20 million years ago to "ice-house" several million years back.
The Joides Resolution is a converted oil-drilling ship equipped with 12 different scientific laboratories. Named after Captain Cook's HMS Resolution, the vessel has been sponsored by the Joint Oceanographic Institutions for Deep Earth Sampling (JOIDES). Since 1985, it has toured the world, collecting samples for research on climate change, east Asian monsoons, the ice ages, sea-level changes and the deep biosphere. The ship's drilling rig is more than 60 metres above the waterline - matching Dublin's Liberty Hall. So far, the ship has drilled to about 6,200 metres - more than 2,000 metres of which has been through the sea floor.
The two Irish-based scientists, Xavier Monteys, of the Geological Survey of Ireland (GSI), and Dr Boris Dorschel, affiliated to University College Cork, will join colleagues from France, Britain, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, China, Japan and North America for the leg, which extends through May.
The main target for the drilling project will be the Challenger mound in the Belgica province on the edge of the Porcupine Seabight. The Belgica is classified as dead and so no live coral will be damaged during drilling. The Porcupine Seabight, off the south-west coast of Ireland, is about 150 kilometres long and 100 kilometres wide , and water depths there range from 400 metres to 3,000 metres.