Drilling for discoveries

YOKOHAMA, Japan

The Chikyu is a study in superlatives. Completed last year, the ship houses the world’s biggest deep-sea drill, carries a high-tech floating laboratory and boasts a $500 million price tag.

The Japanese vessel has an ambitious agenda to match — uncover the secrets of climate change, find microbes that help explain the origin of life and clarify the causes of earthquakes.

The 210-yard ship underwent its first major test run in November, drilling deep into the ocean floor off northern Japan for specimens that scientists say can yield historical information on everything from volcano cycles to global warming.

“The contributions from this are actually immense,” said Daniel Curewitz, a structural geologist who supervises the ship’s lab, as he pointed to long tubes of deep-sea sediment. “Each one of these cores is a tape recorder.”

The key to the project is the Chikyu’s mammoth drill, which operators say is capable of boring nearly 4 miles into the ocean floor. That would be far deeper than the 1.3-mile hole drilled by the 20-year-old U.S. drilling vessel Joides Resolution.

“Beyond 2,000 meters, we will be opening a new frontier in earth sciences,” said Asahiko Taira, a U.S.-educated geologist and director general of the Center for Deep Earth Exploration, which is part of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology.

The drill can reach greater depths with the innovation of the so-called “riser pipe,” which envelopes the drill above the ocean floor and pulls debris from the hole, making it possible to bore deeper.

Chikyu — Japanese for “Earth” — is also equipped with a dynamic positioning system that can keep the ship fixed in an area with a 30-yard diameter, avoiding drift that would bend the drill as it drives into the seabed.

Mr. Curewitz said samples taken from the Earth’s mantle — a region mankind has yet to reach — could provide a wealth of scientific information.

Cores can be analyzed at the floating laboratory, but the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology has also established a core-sample research institute in Kochi, southwestern Japan, for more in-depth examination.

The possible findings make a long and varied list: Climate change over the centuries, atmospheric composition, mantle core and plate dynamics, marine ecosystems and “extremophiles,” life forms that can exist under conditions of extreme temperature or pressure.

The discovery of organisms living under the extreme heat and pressures of the Earth’s mantle, for instance, could give scientists clues about how life began and evolved in the early years of the earth’s existence.

“We can get an idea for where these sediments came from, what kind of animals were living on the bottom and in the ocean at the time,” Mr. Curewitz said. “All of those things give us different ideas for … how the climate changed over time.”

After another year of tests, in 2007 the Chikyu, built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, will join Japan’s long quest to better understand — and perhaps even predict — killer earthquakes.

Japan is one of the most earthquake-prone places on earth, rising from four tectonic plates. A temblor killed more than 6,400 people in the city of Kobe in 1995, and studies indicate about 11,000 people could die if a major quake hits Tokyo.

To meet that danger, Japan has a well-developed network for earthquake detection and alert. Word of a quake flashes across TV screens within a minute after it strikes. But despite decades of research and all the latest technology, the ability to predict an earthquake has been elusive.

The Chikyu’s first assignment will be in the Nankai Trough, a Pacific Ocean zone between two major tectonic plates that has produced powerful, destructive earthquakes off southwestern Japan in the past 1,500 years.

There, geologists hope to drill for the first time deep into the ocean floor at the boundary between the oceanic and continental plates into what’s known as a seismogenic zone — the flash point for quakes.

Scientists will recover core specimens to learn important details, such as what kind of rock is on the plate boundary zone. Hard-rock plate edges, for instance, can lock against one another and then snap under pressure, while soft-rock edges can slowly slide and are less likely to trigger a quake.

Researchers also plan to install monitors in the series of holes drilled by Chikyu and connect them to a cable along the ocean floor that runs to a land station, setting up a mechanism for quick detection of undersea plate movements.

Even then, the ability to predict quakes will be limited. Mr. Taira said researchers are hoping for a 30-second advance warning of a quake — barely enough time to turn off the stove and dive under the kitchen table before disaster strikes.

Still, he has hopes for the future.

“We may be able to have a real-time warning that would save lives,” Mr. Taira said.