Marine Drilling & Vehicles

The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) is an international marine scientific research program supported by 24 countries that advances scientific understanding of the Earth by monitoring, drilling, sampling, and analyzing subseafloor environments. The IODP's scientific ocean drilling vessels are the JOIDES Resolution operated by the US. Implementing Organization (USIO) and the Chikyu Hakken operated by the Japanese Agency for Marine, Earth Sciences and Technology (JAMSTEC).

> Read our primer on how to get involved in IODP

Working for the benefit of the entire U.S. oceanographic community, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) operates a fleet of deep-sea exploration vehicles through the National Deep Submergence Facility (NDSF).

Ocean Research and Education

With 15 Centers and a Central Coordinating Office located throughout the United States, each of the Centers for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence (COSEE) is a consortium of one or more ocean science research institutions, informal science education organizations, and formal education entities. The COSEE program is funded primarily by the NSF with support from the NOAA. In addition to the work by our Centers, we engage in Network-level activities such as Scientist-Educator Partnerships, Ocean Literacy initiatives, and promoting Ocean Careers.

The Consortium for Ocean Leadership is a Washington, DC-based nonprofit organization that represents 94 of the leading public and private ocean research and education institutions, aquaria and industry with the mission to advance research, education and sound ocean policy. The organization also manages ocean research and education programs in areas of scientific ocean drilling, ocean observing, ocean exploration, and ocean partnerships.

Ridge Systems

Ridge 2000 is a multidisciplinary science research program focused on integrated geological and biological studies of the Earth-encircling oceanic spreading center system. The National Science Foundation supports the program as a component of its Earth & Environmental Science research.

InterRidge promotes interdisciplinary, international studies of oceanic spreading centers by creating a global research community, planning and coordinating new science programs that no single nation can achieve alone, exchanging scientific information, and sharing new technologies and facilities. InterRidge is dedicated to reaching out to the public, scientists and governments, and to providing a unified voice for ocean ridge researchers worldwide.

Marine Microbes

The Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education (C-MORE) is a NSF-sponsored Science and Technology Center designed to facilitate a more comprehensive understanding of the diverse assemblages of microorganisms in the sea, with the primary mission of linking genomes to biomes.

The role of the International Census of Marine Microbes (ICoMM) is to promote an agenda and an environment that will accelerate discovery, understanding, and awareness of the global significance of marine microbes.

Deep Carbon & Observatories

The Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) is a multi-disciplinary, international initiative dedicated to achieving a transformational understanding of Earth's deep carbon cycle, including its poorly constrained reservoirs and fluxes, the unknown role of deep biology, and unexplored influences of the deep carbon cycle on critical societal concerns related to energy, environment and climate.

The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) will construct a networked infrastructure of science-driven sensor systems to measure the physical, chemical, geological and biological variables in the ocean and seafloor. The Regional Scale Nodes component of the National Science Foundation's OOI provides unprecedented power (10 kV) and bandwidth (10 Gb/s) to scientific sensor arrays on the seafloor and throughout the water column using instrumented moorings.

Continental Drilling

ANDRILL (Antarctic Geological Drilling) is a multinational collaboration to drill deep into the Antarctic margin and recover stratigraphic records to reveal past glacial history and to predict Earth's future climate.

Under consideration by the National Science Foundation, the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL) will be the world's largest, deepest underground laboratory providing opportunities for transformational discoveries in particle physics, nuclear physics and astrophysics, as well as biology in extreme environments and the geological structure of the earth's crusts.

The International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) addresses fundamental scientific problems of global importance as an element of geological and geophysical research programs. The mission of the ICDP is to provide exact, fundamental and globally significant knowledge of the composition, structure and processes of the Earth's crust through the unique capacities of scientific drilling. The ICDP USA program is DOSECC (Drilling, Observation and Sampling of the Earth's Continental Crust).