International scientific research ship JOIDES Resolution tackles Zealandia missions

A high-tech floating laboratory that has just finished probing New Zealand's largest earthquake fault is now sailing to Antarctica to drill kilometres deep into ice sheets for critical climate change clues.

International scientific research ship JOIDES Resolution is in New Zealand waters undertaking expeditions over 18 months to study quakes, tectonics, undersea volcanoes and climate change.

It's part of an ongoing five-year project, a collaboration of the 26-nation International Ocean Discovery Programme (IODP), to explore the newly discovered "lost" continent of Zealandia.

The 140m state-of-the-art drill ship has called in to Christchurch's Lyttelton Port having just completed a major programme looking at New Zealand's largest fault, the Hikurangi subduction zone, off the coast of Gisborne.

Understanding how the massive "locked zone" on the fault works is hugely important for New Zealand, but also the rest of the world, scientists say.

Niwa marine geologist Phil Barnes said the expedition to look at slow slip events at subduction zones was the first of its kind anywhere in the world.

The Gisborne zones are relatively shallow and allow scientists to be able to drill 600m–750m below the seafloor and help them understand what types of rocks might be associated with slow-slipping faults.

It's also helped them work out why some faults are prone to slow slips while others aren't and what sort of quake and tsunami hazards they might pose for New Zealand's east coast communities and elsewhere. Other researchers have used the ship to study strange submarine landslides.

JOIDES Resolution will leave Lyttelton over the next few days for a mission to the Ross Sea so scientists can try and understand what things were like there around 20 million years ago.

A previous IODP expedition found evidence from core samples that Antarctica was tropical in parts around 50 million years ago. The samples revealed fossilised remains of palm trees and showed tropical water temperatures of 25C–28C.

New Zealand leader of the Ross Sea expedition, Rob McKay of Victoria University of Wellington, says paleo-calibrated models indicate that Antarctica has the potential to contribute more than 1m of sea-level rise by the year 2100 and more than 15m by 2500 if emissions continue unabated.

McKay hopes the two-month trip, which will involve six geological drill cores, will help improve understanding of the link between warming oceans and melting ice sheets.

Drilling will also help recover a record of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet in central Ross Sea from the past 20 million years.

Scientific ocean drilling provides the only means to collect samples and data, and monitor conditions and active processes as they occur deep beneath the seafloor of New Zealand's exclusive economic zone, which covers about 15 times the land area of the country, and in the Southern Ocean.

The infrastructure involved in scientific ocean drilling is generally too expensive for a single institution or nation to afford. So countries have pooled resources to form the IODP that operates ships, manages expeditions, maintains core storage and analytical facilities, and co-ordinates processes for vetting research proposals.

Each voyage has a crew of up to 40 scientists from 10 to 15 countries, with a similar number of engineers and support crew looking after everything from computing and lab facilities, the 24-hour kitchen, and a laundry service.