Overview

Drilling an ultra-deep hole in an intact portion of oceanic lithosphere, through the crust to the Mohorovicic discontinuity (the ‘Moho’), and into the uppermost mantle is a long-standing ambition of scientific ocean drilling, and remains essential to answer fundamental questions about the dynamics of the Earth and global elemental cycles. The 2010 MoHole workshop had two interconnected objective, which have been discussed jointly between ocean lithosphere specialists, marine geophysicists, and engineers:

• To initiate a roadmap for technology development, and the project implementation plan, to achieve the deep drilling objectives of the MoHole project,
• To identify potential MoHole sites in Pacific fast-spread crust, where the scientific community will focus geophysical site survey efforts over the next few years.

Workshop Report (pdf)
Meeting Website

Steering Committee

Benoit Ildefonse, CNRS
Natsue Abe, JAMSTEC
Yoshio Isozaki, JAMSTEC
Donna Blackman, Scripps Intuition of Oceanography
Juan Pablo Canales, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Greg Myers, Consortium for Ocean Leadership
Mladen R. Nedimovic, Dalhousie University
Shuichi Kodaira, JAMSTEC
Damon Teagle, University of Southampton
Douglas Wilson, University of California
Susumu Umino, Kanazawa University