* Astronomy

Researchers on Chikyu Report Successful Riser-Drilling
Kumano Basin off Kii Peninsula, approximately 58 km southeast of Japan - Despite harsh weather and ocean conditions, and complex geological characteristics of its drill site, the deep-sea drilling vessel CHIKYU, for the first time in the history of scientific ocean drilling, conducted riser-drilling operations to successfully drill down to a depth of 1,603.7 metres beneath the sea floor (at water depth of 2,054 metres).

Read more

A Japanese research vessel carrying the world's largest deep-sea drill has completed its first expedition after collecting data it hopes will help discover more about earthquakes, officials said Saturday.
The 210-metre ship Chikyu - the Japanese word for "Earth" - was on a mission to clarify the causes of earthquakes and uncover the secrets of climate change.
Chikyu on Thursday completed its first 56-day assignment in the Nankai Trough, a Pacific Ocean zone between two major tectonic plates that has produced powerful, destructive earthquakes off southwest Japan over the past 1 500 years, according to the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, which developed the ¥57-billion vessel.

Read more

One of the most ambitious earth science expeditions yet mounted to gain a better understanding of the earthquake process, has begun off the coast of Japan, involving geologists from the universities of Southampton and Leicester.
Dr Lisa McNeill, of the University of Southampton's School of Ocean and Earth Science, based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, and Joanne Tudge, of the Department of Geology, University of Leicester, are taking part in the multi-disciplinary study of a 'subduction' zone off the Japanese coast, aboard the deep-sea drilling vessel Chikyu (which means 'Planet Earth' in Japanese). This is the maiden scientific voyage of this vessel, which has unique capabilities enabling it to access new regions of the Earth's crust.
Large-scale subduction earthquakes are the world's most powerful seismic events and the cause of major catastrophes, such as the 2004 earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean.
Japan, which has endured devastating earthquakes in cities such as Kobe in 1995, has made major investments in technology, including Chikyu, to learn more about seismic activity near its shores.
Lisa McNeill, a lecturer at Southampton, joins the Nankai Trough Seismogenic Zone Experiment (or NanTroSEIZE) expedition, part of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), as a scientific participant, but will also serve as a co-chief scientist on a later phase of the experiment in 2009.
PhD student Joanne Tudge is part of the Geophysics and Borehole Research Group in the Department of Geology at Leicester, which has a long-standing history of providing logging services and expertise for the IODP. Her research focuses on interpreting data from the borehole to better understand the sediments. On this NanTroSEIZE expedition she will be working to classify the rocks and understand the physical properties of the sediments in the subduction zone.
The project is ambitious in scale - the first phase alone is the longest period of scientific ocean drilling ever attempted in one area. In the second phase, colleagues will attempt to break the scientific ocean drilling depth record by targeting a fault around 3500m below the sea floor.
During the third phase, the drill ship aims to reach the main plate boundary at 6km and place long-term monitoring tools. The experiment will take samples and install observatories to assess, for example, how strain is building up on the fault, the effects of fluid on rocks and the physical properties of sediments as they are deformed.

'The scale of this experiment is unprecedented and I am very excited to be taking part. This is an extremely challenging expedition but the results should give us a much greater understanding of the processes responsible for generating earthquakes and tsunami' - Dr Lisa McNeill.

The project (Nankai Trough Seismogenic Zone Experiments or NanTroSEIZE) is supported by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), a marine research initiative jointly funded by Japan, the United States, a consortium of European countries, the People's Republic of China, and South Korea. The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) provides the UK's contribution to the IODP through ECORD (the European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling).
NanTroSEIZE, and the inaugural expedition which has just begun, is led by chief project scientists Dr Harold Tobin, a marine geologist on the faculty of University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Dr Masa Kino****a, a marine geophysicist at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), a leading research institution in Japan.

Read more

The deeper you can sample the seafloor, the further back in time you can go
Since the early part of the 20th century, scientists have been going to sea on ships equipped with long, hollow pipes called corers. These corers are used to collect seafloor sediments, plunging into the ocean bottom and capturing long stratified plugs of the seabed. These sediments contain clues to a myriad of past conditions and events in the Earths oceans and climate.
Over decades, technology and methods for handling coring systems have become safer, and core samples have become longer, reaching 20 to 25 metres  in length. This longer reach provides access to deeper, older sediments, and thus a look further back into Earth history.
In the 1970s, Charlie Hollister at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) recovered an historic core from the Northeast Pacific. It contained one of the longest continuous records of ocean basin history: 65 million yearsback to times when dinosaurs still roamed the planet. As scientists still do today, Hollister and colleagues studied tiny fossilised shells and fish teeth found in the core. Careful analysis of these remnants can reveal the temperature, water chemistry, and other characteristics of ancient oceans.

Read more