Community Facility Support: Management and Operation of a Continental Scientific Drilling and Coring Facility

This Division of Earth Sciences Program community facility award supports operations and management of the Continental Scientific Drilling Facility (CSDF). Several types of Earth science research require analyzing materials such as soil, rock, water, and microbes below the ground surface. Drilled boreholes also allow installation of instruments below the surface that improve our understanding of earthquake processes, or the movement of water below the surface, or processes that form different minerals and change rock into soil, or the best ways to harness geothermal energy. Over time, sediment layers are deposited in lakes, and each of the sediment layers contains information about the conditions around the lake at the time it was deposited. Collecting core samples from lakebeds allows analysis of the layers of sediment to understand how climate, water, ecosystems, volcanoes, and Earth's plate motions have changed in the region near the lake, throughout the entire lifespan of the lake. Reaching these materials deep below the surface requires drilling and core sampling. These procedures are complex, expensive, and can be high risk, and the tools, instruments, and data systems are specialized. CSDF supports hundreds of research projects per year that involve short coring in lakes to deep drilling in crystalline rock. Activities of the CSDF include: project development; logistics and contracting; field operations management; outreach, diversity, and education; rental and sales of specialized equipment and supplies; core scanning, splitting/slabbing, subsampling, and description; subsample preparation and analysis; maintenance of repositories for stewardship of samples, data, publications, and reference collections; cyberinfrastructure development; physical infrastructure development; and community coordination.

Scientific drilling and coring are essential for the advancement of the Earth Sciences. They are the primary means to access fresh, unweathered materials that are not exposed at the surface. Core samples from lakes and other sedimentary basins provide archives of environmental and ecosystem history, allowing reconstruction of the Earth-life system through time to understand system changes and ecosystem response and resilience. Core samples and boreholes provide a means to understand hydrologic, geologic, and geochemical processes operating at depth, through sampling, in-situ measurements, and long-term monitoring. Subsurface microbiological communities may be sampled and analyzed to understand their role in rock weathering, fault mechanics, and other geologic and geochemical processes. Scientific motivations are diverse, including hydrology and fluid transport, geochemistry, geomicrobiology, paleorecords of the Earth-Life system, volcanology and magmatism, tectonics, geothermal, fault mechanics and seismicity, rock weathering, and bolide impacts. Coring and drilling operations that enable this science are often complex, highly technical, expensive, and entail substantial risk, and the equipment, tooling, instrumentation, and data management systems required are specialized. Although requirements vary between projects, the many commonalities allow economies of scale by leveraging shared expertise and resources, even as projects range in depth or cost by a factor of 100,000 or more. The Continental Scientific Drilling (CSD) Facility delivers resources for all of these communities in accordance with their priorities.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.