The ocean floor drilling project is part of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Programme (IODP), an international marine research programme involving the collaboration of international scientific research organisations aimed at exploring Earth's history and structure as recorded in seafloor sediments and rocks and monitoring subseafloor environments. Ocean floor drilling provides essential material for the study of climate change, biodiversity, geophysics and geodynamics. The project is being managed by ECORD Science Operator, a group of European institutions coordinated by the British Geological Survey.

The scientific objectives of the Tahiti expedition are to reconstruct the sea level rise following the last major glacial event 21,000 years ago when half of North America and most of Northern Europe were covered by thick ice sheets and sea level was about 120m lower than today. In addition, the expedition aims to reconstruct associated changes in sea surface temperatures and to analyse the effects of climatic and sea level changes on reef building.

The project follows on from last year's successful and similar expedition to the Arctic Ocean for IODP, where Seacore, working in water depths of 800m to 1,400m, recovered cores up to 428m into the seabed from sites along the 1,800km long Lomonosov Ridge, extending from Greenland towards Russia.

For the Tahiti project Seacore will mount its own heave compensated R100 drill rig, built initially for the Lomonosov Ridge project, onto the multiservice construction vessel DPHunter to provide the drilling and sampling services. Seacore will also use a novel, purpose built borehole drilling and seabed re-entry template known as DART, which is expected to considerably reduce the risk of any localised damage to the Tahiti reefs during core sampling.

DP Hunter is expected to mobilise from Tampa USA this month and be on station off the coast of Tahiti by early next month. The recovered cores will be left complete and taken to the IODP Core Repository at Bremen University in Germany for detailed analysis.

MJ Information No: 21012