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Quest for the Mantle

May 11, 2016

For more than half a century, scientists have tried to drill through the Earth’s rocky crust to reach its mantle. WHOI geophysicist Henry Dick, who has dedicated much of his life to that quest, recently co-led the first in a series of expeditions to Atlantis Bank in the southwestern Indian Ocean. There, researchers are trying again to reach the crust-mantle boundary several miles below the sea floor, as part of an effort to understand how the lower ocean crust was formed. The first leg of drilling brought up cores from as deep as half a mile into the crust, including these samples of an igneous rock called gabbro.

(Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)