FUTURE D.E.E.P. REGIONAL PLANNING WORKSHOP
Hobart, 3-4 April 2023
Our international community gathered for Future Drilling to Explore Earth’s Past: ANZIC’s Australasian and Southern Ocean regional planning hybrid workshop to support scientists in developing proposals for the next generation of scientific drilling.
Read the final FUTURE DEEP report!
The importance of the Southern Hemisphere in the narratives of the nature and history of oceanographic, climate, plate tectonics and sub-seafloor microbiology, is well established, but regional questions are understudied. To develop this capability, the international scientific drilling communities (IODP and ICDP) need a deeper understanding of the environmental and geological processes that affect our planet, which requires access to samples of sediments, rocks, fluids, and microbes from deep below the subsurface.
The Future DEEP Workshop provided an important channel for the development of innovative drilling proposals concerning diverse scientific topics for submission to scientific ocean drilling programs (for post-IODP drilling) and ICDP. The workshop was introduced with a plenary session of international invited speakers outlining the broad science plans of the scientific drilling programs (post-IODP platform providers, ICDP) and capabilities (including site surveys and other national drilling and digital infrastructure), as well as lightning talks reviewing key themes and ideas in the regional context during breakout sessions.
The Southern Ocean and Australasia region is an ideal region to address many of the 5 Flagship Initiatives outlined in the “2050 Science Framework: Exploring Earth by Scientific Ocean Drilling” and ICDP forward strategies to use the investigative tool of scientific drilling to test existing models developed at the Earth’s surface.