On April 12th 2017, the Ocean Science and Engineering Department teachers and students headed over to Hong Kong to visit the ocean drilling research ship “Joides Resolution”. Professor Yang Yong, Chair of the Department of Oceanography led the team of 4 professors and 24 undergraduates.
Visiting the “Joides Resolution”
Meeting the “Joides Resolution” crew
The ship is used as a mobile drilling rig, first by the Ocean Drilling Program and then later by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program. It was originally launched in 1978 under the name “Sedco / BP 471”, jointly owned by the American Sedco Inc. and British Petroleum Company (BP) for commercial oil exploration. It is only after it’s conversion to ocean scientific research that it took on the name “Joides Resolution”. The meaning behind the first part of the name comes from the deep ocean exploration research institutions consortium (Joint Oceangraphic Institutions Deep Earth Sampling – JOIDES), while “Resolution” was chosen to commemorate the famous 18th-century British explorer James Cook who led the “HRM Resolution” to explore the Pacific and Antarctic regions.
The ship is 143m long and 21m wide, while the drilling rig towers 61.5m high above the deck. It operates a drill string of 9150m and can drill down to a maximum depth of 8235m, or 4000m under sea level.
Compared to it’s predecessor “Glomar Challenger”, JOIDES Resolution is more powerful, stable and can drill much deeper. The ship is equipped with some of the world’s most powerful propulsion and lifting equipment, and also has a 1,400 square meters, seven-story laboratory for sedimentology, petrology, paleontology, geochemistry, geophysics and other research.
Since it’s conversion to scientific research in 1985, the JOIDES Resolution has completed a total of 132 expeditions, travelled 422 882 miles and visited 743 sites, drilling more than 2000 holes from which it extracted over 40 000 cores which provide valuable insight about our planet’s geology.
