IODP Lord Howe Rise Drilling Proposal: Tectonics, Climate and Ancient Life

Geoscience Australia and JAMSTEC lead an international proposal to drill a 2500-meter stratigraphic well into the submerged Lord Howe Rise. The project aims to recover Cretaceous and older sediments to define the role of continental crustal ribbons in plate tectonics and test microbial life evolution over 100 million years. Preparations included a 2016 seismic survey mapping a 20 km thick crust and a detailed 2017 site survey.

Use Cases

• Modeling plate tectonic cycles and continental evolution based on data from a deep stratigraphic well through a rift basin.
• Constraining Cretaceous paleoclimate and ocean biogeochemistry based on recovered high-latitude biomarker and micropaleontology data.
• Testing evolutionary concepts for sub-seafloor microbial life over a 100-million-year timeframe.
• Mapping crustal structure and sedimentary basin architecture based on 2D seismic reflection and refraction data.

Strengths

• Proposal rated 'excellent' by the IODP Science Evaluation Panel in January 2017.
• Seismic survey data helped constrain a crustal thickness of about 20 km beneath the Lord Howe Rise.
• Drilling planned to extend to a depth of up to 2500 meters below the seafloor.

Limitations

• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

Geoscience Australia and JAMSTEC, submitted to the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP).

Collection Method

Proposed deep riser stratigraphic drilling and coring, supported by seismic and geotechnical surveys.

Time Range

Proposal submitted October 2015; drilling planned for 2019 or 2020.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-28 12:37:40.761300; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Lord Howe Rise in the Tasman Sea, southwest Pacific, water depths of 1000–3000 m.