Angelo Camerlenghi

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This transcript is based on a video-recorded interview deposited at MarE3, JAMSTEC (Yokosuka, Japan).

The transcripts of the research project Oral Histories of Scientific Ocean Drilling are polished representations of oral conversations, and are intended solely for the purpose of preserving and documenting personal accounts and memories. They are not a literary product, and are not intended to exhibit literary qualities.

The primary goal of this transcript is to capture the spoken words and memories of the interviewee as accurately as possible. Minor editing and polishing works have been performed to enhance clarity and readability while maintaining the authenticity of spoken discourse, including non-standard grammar, inconsistencies, repetitions, and pauses.

The reader must be aware that memories of an event can vary between individuals and may evolve over time due to various factors, such as subsequent experiences, interactions with others, and personal emotions.

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Please cite the interview as:

Interview of Angelo Camerlenghi by Beatriz Martinez-Rius on 2025 May 21, JAMSTEC Headquarters (Yokosuka, Japan). [link]

BMR: Today is 21 of May of 2025. I am Beatriz Martinez-Rius, historian of science at JAMSTEC, and I’m in JAMSTEC head. Thank you. So, can you please say your name, your affiliation and your current position?

AC: My name is Angelo Camerlenghi. I’m a researcher at the National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics – OGS is the short name – in Trieste, Italy.

BMR: And what is your relation to scientific ocean drilling?

AC: Wow… Scientific ocean drilling went with me throughout my entire scientific career, from where I was a student in the University of Milano, until now, here, sitting at the JAMSTEC headquarters.

BMR: So, let’s just start chronologically, and then we will go into more the managerial roles. First thing is, where are you from? And how was your childhood like? Did you have any relation to science early on?

AC: I was born in Bergamo. Bergamo is a small town at the foot of the Alps, Central Alps, northeast of Milano. It’s a town known for people who have a mountaineering background; far away from the sea – because it’s either mountain or the plain, the big rivers. And it’s really nothing to do with the sea. And I grew up there. My family were not from there. So, I was commuting – we were commuting a lot between Bergamo and a valley in the Piedmont region, which is further to the west. This was high mountains, a valley, I consider that the origin of my family. And again, no contact with the sea other than holidays on the beaches just when we were kids. So, I don’t know exactly how I got interested to marine geology, because that is what I’m doing.

It was, I think, by chance, but I was already a student at the university — so we are jumping… My childhood was dominated by mountains, hiking. Then, slowly, I went into mountaineer skiing, with the skins; a little bit of climbing… I’ve never been a good climber, we liked to climb to the top of some mountains, not only rock climbing. That was my life. And for that reason, that I liked the mountain so much, I decided with the very scientific motivation, to study geology. Because I thought, at the time, that you see geology through the mountains. I had no idea about marine geology. In high school they don’t tell you much about that.

So, when I went to geology in Milano, there was a nice tradition there that the new students could have a sense of what is geological mapping by accompanying the older students, the one approaching the degree, in their fieldwork. And the young students were called “sherpas”, those carrying the rocks samples for the older people – it was not like this, but the idea was to do the sherpa, and the elder students would put signs on the wall of the entrance of the department saying when and where they would go for their fieldwork, and you could sign and just join. So, with a friend of mine, who is now a professor at the University of Milano, we were friends, commuting every day from Bergamo to Milano. We saw that one group was going to Val Veny. Val Veny is one of the two valleys of the Mont Blanc, the Italian valleys. When you go to the Mont Blanc from Italy, you go up the valley da Aosta, and then the valleys split in two. One is Val Ferret, and one is Val Veny. The Mont Blanc is the mountain, you know? We’ve never been there before, and we said, “Okay, we’ll go” – not a very scientific reason, just the beauty of the mountain. And there, we met a nice group of students, very nice people, and we didn’t know they were students of Maria Bianca Cita. I think many people know Maria Bianca Cita, marine geologist… well, she was many, many things, but one of the biggest impact on the community in Italy was scientific drilling and marine geology.

But there, we were only doing mapping on metamorphic and intrusive rocks; no sedimentary rocks, nothing about the sea. But sometime later, I didn’t know then, they were going on scientific expeditions in the Mediterranean Sea to do marine geology. They needed some students to help and they asked me. So, one of these elder students called me up one day or met me and say, “Hey, we are looking for someone to go with us on an expedition at sea”. I had never thought about that before, but I thought it was cool. And I went and said, “Yes, of course I’m with you”. And this was a really, really, a turning point in my entire life, not only career; life. And I even sensed that this was an important moment in my life, because I remember – at the time, I was probably 21, I was living with my parents in Bergamo, and I went back home and there was my mother there, and I said, “Mum, I think today something happened that will change my life”. And I had no reason to think about it, but I had felt this.

So, I went for the first cruise as a helper. I was helping assembling the gravity and piston coring, hammering; doing all the dirty work. I knew nothing about geology at the time. I was very young. I knew nothing about techniques… But with experience, you learn a lot. And then there was one expedition, second expedition… And I think I did, as a student, 4 or 5. And then, if I may continue the story, I graduated with a thesis, not in marine geology, because Maria Cita was looking at the geological record of the Messinian Salinity Crisis in Italy. She was looking at the highest in elevation outcrops of the Messinian rocks, and the deepest in the subsurface in wells. Her idea was to estimate tectonic movements, because assuming – it was not a good assumption – but assuming at the time that these rocks were deposited at the same level, then if you find them 4000m in a well and 2000m in elevation, you can say that there was a displacement in the surface in 5 million years of about six kilometers.

She gave me an outcrop in the central Apennines that was supposedly the highest in elevation, 1,600 meters. It turned out I went to visit the place with a local geologist, and it turned out that it was not a Messinian outcrop, the geological map was wrong. And so, I did a thesis on geomorphological mapping in the central Apennines, But, with the expeditions I did, I was involved in some scientific papers in marine geology. And when I finished, I told myself that it would be good to continue studying marine geology. I think that I had already an offer for an interview at Agip, the national oil company. Now ENI; it was called Agip, based in Milano. And all the good students coming out of the department, so half of my fellow students, more or less, are now working at Agip, ENI, because they were sucked into the system almost automatically. I had an offer for an interview and I said, “No, I don’t even want the interview because I don’t want to start working now. I want to continue studying”.

Then, I looked for the Fulbright Fellowships, US exchange. I applied, I wanted to go in a place at Lehigh University, in Pennsylvania to study marine geotechnology. This was my idea. It was too expensive there, so it was a very big disappointment because they had accepted my application. But the cost of the university, that I think as a private university, was excessive. So, they proposed me, the people at the Fulbright, they told me, “You can go to Texas A&M that is very cheap” because it’s a public institution first, and it’s not too expensive. And they told me, “You can have a student fellowship that will help you having a low tuition”. And the student fellowship happened to be at the Ocean Drilling Program that had just moved to College Station. The time it was 1986, and the program started at Texas A&M, Ocean Drilling Program, in 1985. There was this transfer of people and everything from Scripps to Texas A&M, California to Texas.

I just found myself one super-hot day of August landing in Houston and then going to College Station, which is a very unusual place, in those times especially, not knowing what I was doing there… It was not what I wanted to do. At the beginning, I even thought that it was a bad choice. But the moments of doubt lasted very, very short time because then the director of the Ocean Drilling Program, Phil [Philip] Rabinowitz, a super nice guy, he welcomed me really… Like, I don’t say like a father, but, he was really nice telling me, “Okay, don’t worry. I know you come from the group of Maria Bianca Cita, who is a great person that I really admire, so you must be a good student… You can have a fellowship with us, you can get a Master…” I didn’t want to get a diploma, but he said, “If you enroll into a Master, it would be better for you”. He gave advice. And he put me in the group of many other students that, like me, had come to College Station from many places in the US and outside the US. I had a really great time. And this was, I mean, seeing the program from inside as a student, as a technician – because initially it was a technician – it gave me an opportunity to appreciate the mechanism of the managing of the program, before even than the science, because I was still learning a lot. And then, I went back to Milan for a PhD, and I started my scientific career in marine geology or marine geoscience.

BMR: Then, your PhD was that one on the Apennines that you just mentioned?

AC: In those times, in Italy, we didn’t have the Bologna system of three higher education levels – bachelor, master’s and PhD. The basic degree in Italy was, you have one type of degree, full stop. And still today, you get the title of doctor without having a PhD. The PhD did not exist, at the time. When I came back in 1989, they offered me a PhD program that was the third cycle, the third year after the introduction of the doctoral program in Italy. They didn’t even know… Most of the staff in universities didn’t even know what the PhD is. They thought it was a way of funding students.

But I did it with Maria [Bianca] Cita, and she knew exactly what the PhD is. And I did my thesis on the mud volcanoes of the Eastern Mediterranean, which was not what I wanted to do. I mean, my career has been a series of doing something that was not my initial choice. I wanted to study the things that I studied at Texas A&M, which is natural osmosis in the marine environment between different solutions of different salinities, one salinity is seawater and the other is a brine, subsurface brine. And I understood there that natural clays can have an osmotic effect. So, inducing a flow of water, pure water or solute, through the pore space to equilibrate the salinities. But Maria Cita said, “No, no, no, no, we have discovered the mud volcanoes in the eastern Mediterranean. You have to work on the mud volcanoes. This is so important…” She didn’t say, but she meant, “Who cares about osmosis? (laughs) mud volcanoes are more important”. And I accepted that, and I had a great time studying mun volcanoes.

BMR: Before continuing with your research, I wanted to ask you about Maria Bianca Cita. What kind of person and what kind of mentor she was? And in which sense she was influential for you?

AC: She had a big influence on even my personality, I would say. There are people that influence your personality in good and bad ways, and I’m not only celebrating… But what I remember is that when the students that I met on the Mont Blanc introduced me to her, I knew about her because she was quite… Not that famous, but in geology, everyone knew about Maria Bianca Cita. So, I knew the fame of this lady from Milan, always very elegant, very internationally well-known; a person also with some… Not conflicts, but sometimes she was controversial to the Italian scientific community.

 So, she welcomed me in her office and, she asked if I wanted to go, and I said yes. And then she told me, “Remember that you can make mistakes. It’s not a problem. Don’t worry. And you can make mistakes one time, and another time… After the third time, it’s stopped”. So, this is to say, she reassured me but she also pretended that I would pay attention. But it was a very friendly welcome, showing a bigger level of trust; I mean, she was already in an advanced stage of her career, with a young student, totally ignorant about geology. But she had some trust and went in involving us as students in the cruises. She gave us tasks and we were responsible for them. She wouldn’t just check every other minute, “What are you doing? How are you doing? Have you done this?” This is something, this attitude I try to maintain now with my students, and it works. Young people need to feel that the older people trust them, and they are not all too critical about them.

BMR: So, after your study in mud volcanoes, how did you go back to scientific ocean drilling?

AC: What happened is that while studying the mud volcanoes in the eastern Mediterranean for my PhD, I then had one year of contract. While I was a student, toward the end of that period, Maria Bianca Cita took the chair of the ESCO Office (ESF Science Committee for the ODP) – now I’m thinking about the acronym is… It was the equivalent of ESSAC (ECORD Science Support Advisory Committee) today, not of the European Consortium ECORD, but of the consortium of the Smaller European States. So, in ODP, UK, Germany, and France where individual members and they had the money to be that. The other European countries with not enough money established a European consortium of the smaller countries, of which Italy was the biggest funder, and there were two groups, the northern European countries, the Nordic countries, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and Sweden; and the other countries had another group. And this consortium was under the European Science Foundation. Every country put some money, they built the budget, and then they had to decide how many people go on the ship and everything.

Maria Bianca Cita took the chair of the ESCO and she needed a secretariat help. And she asked me and Elisabetta Erba, who is another big scientific personality in Italy. I was just coming out of the PhD; she had just finished, I think, two cycles ahead of me. And we were helping just doing typing, making photocopies, and organizing meetings. This was the first way to get into the European part of the program that I had totally missed in the US, because there, I was in the headquarters.

And then, we started to develop a drilling proposal to drill in the Mediterranean, eastern Mediterranean Sea. Part of the objectives were drilling through the mud volcanoes. And this proposal was accepted. It was drilled sometimes later as ODP leg 160. There were two legs in the Mediterranean, eastern Mediterranean, leg 160, and western Mediterranean, leg 161. In the meantime, I had finished with Milano. I found the contract to work at OGS, the same institute where I am now, but the contract was to work in Antarctica. So, I went there, with this let’s call it postdoctoral position, with a background in Mediterranean marine geology, while leading a scientific proposal for drilling in the Eastern Mediterranean. But I was paid to work in Antarctica. And, in the end, when the proposal was approved and ODP was looking for a co-chief, they invited me to be a co-chief. I was at the time 35, so very young. And so, I told my director at OGS, “Is it okay if I accept?”, because you need to guarantee 50% of your time dedicated to the drilling, if you are a co-chief. And you have to sign it. And the director said, “No, no, no, no, you have to work full time on Antarctica. If you do it, you do it in your spare time”. And I said, “No, you don’t become a co-chief in the spare time. There’s no way”. Finally, I had to say no to the opportunity to be a co-chief. And this triggered the tension with Maria Bianca Cita. I remember we had some very tough discussions over the telephone because she wanted an Italian co-chief scientist in the Mediterranean drilling, because she was very supportive – actually, she was part of the idea of doing this proposal. But I said, “Maria Bianca, I have a job here. I’m paid to go to Antarctica… My director says “no”; I cannot…” Then, it was good, that after some time I wrote a proposal – I mean, not me, with Peter Barker of the British Antarctic Survey, we wrote the proposal to drill the Antarctic Peninsula, Pacific margin. It was approved, and I was asked again to be a co-chief. So, a few years later, okay, I made it to the role of co-chief but in Antarctica, not in the Mediterranean.

BMR: You mentioned that you were involved in different aspects of scientific ocean drilling not on the ship itself, but in the organization, the planning, the Italian organization… How do you think that early contact with the international program kind of shaped your career or your approach to science or collaborations?

AC: The experience in Texas was fundamental, because you when you see… I could talk to the engineers, to the people of the logistics, to the staff scientists… The expedition managers now were called staff scientists; and there was a group of young staff scientists, many of them European. And I could see how the preparation of an expedition, drilling leg, was. We were helping even preparing coffee, during the post cruise meetings. So, we were in continuous contact with the scientists. As a Master’s student, talking to these big names, I remember… You start observing, creating your own opinion about systems, people, scientists, technicians, engineers… I really appreciated the role of the technical and engineering staff in support of the scientist. Like, a scientist with his or her hands can do nothing. Even sometimes they don’t acknowledge that they need other people – but in scientific drilling in general they do.

Then I was invited, like all the students, to go on a drilling leg as a technician. So, I stayed with the technicians on the other side. I was becoming a scientist, but I was staying on the other side. I think that gave me the basics of the management of a complex, scientific program like this. I think I owe a lot to that time spent at Texas A&M.

BMR: Yeah. It’s also sounds like a very formative experience also in the sense that, the Italian community – even though you knew Maria Bianca Cita, who was very international – I can imagine that was a very different type of scientific community.

AC: Yeah, yeah. I never had a very strong bond with the Italian scientific community, I think because – generally speaking; I have many excellent colleagues in Italy with whom I have worked. But in general, the scientific community was very radicated [closely tied] on the territory of Italy, in those times. I’m not talking about today. Limited international experience… So, a very provincial approach to geology. And while I was coming out of the US system with no biases, and then I went to Antarctica and I was working… Antarctica is a good background, even if the topics were completely different, but we also worked on mud volcanoes and fluids in Antarctica. But in Antarctica, you do international cooperation by default, because of the Antarctic Treaty, the different bases, the SCAR (Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research), stimulated international cooperation.

So, I always grew scientifically in an international environment. And going back to the national Italian system was always painful, because I felt the difference.

BMR: So, the first time you went onboard the JOIDES Resolution it was directly like a co-chief scientist.

AC: No, right. There’s another part of the story. The first time I went as a technician, as I said, in 1987, I think. Then… I was already at OGS, and I was hired to look at the seismic reflection data collected by OGS, with the ship OGS Explora that was serving the National Antarctic Program, the PNRA, and they were working in the Ross Sea, where the Italian base is located; but also, for some reasons that I don’t recall how it came out, there was a program of seismic surveying the Antarctic Peninsula Pacific margin, even if there are no Italian bases, there. So, when selecting who works where, they proposed me to work on the Antarctic Peninsula. I don’t remember why. I think it was just, “You take this, you take that”. There were other students, like Michele Rebesco, who is here, he was working with me on the Antarctic Peninsula; Laura de Santis, who is another… We all went to OGS as young postdocs at the same time. She was given the Ross Sea area, and she is still working on the Ross Sea. So, it was like this, random. And we found gas hydrates through this seismic reflection data on the Antarctic Peninsula; fluids, gas hydrates… And I became involved in gas hydrates research in Antarctica. That was totally unexpected, because the topic was the evolution of the ice sheets to try to match with climate evolution, sea level… The drilling in Antarctica was sea level, which was not my topic; so, I started working on the gas hydrates. And then, because I was still connected with the ODP people, there was a drilling leg, 146, scheduled, where I had nothing to do with the proposal. They were drilling for gas hydrates offshore Oregon and Cascadia. It was a combination of two proposals working on gas hydrates. They were staffing and they needed a sedimentologist, and they invited me to this leg. It’s like a special call of today. When they do this staffing and they realize they are missing one expert, they call for another. But, in this case, there was not a call. They just invited me to go as a sedimentologist, and I went. But in this case, my director did not oppose because as a sedimentologist, you don’t have to guarantee this huge amount of time. And the topic was the gas hydrates, and was directly connected with what I was doing on the Antarctic Peninsula. So, in this I was sedimentologist and later, co-chief scientist on the Antarctic Peninsula. And that was it. I never went back to the ship since then.

BMR: Oh, I think I knew it, but I was not totally aware of it. About being a co-chief scientist, what was your impression of being the leading scientist of a team? What was the thing you enjoyed the most, and the most difficult aspect to handle?

AC: I think… I knew and people had told me, but it is really true that when you are in charge of a group, or especially as a co-chief, you don’t look at the cores like all the other scientists, because you have to talk to the drillers, talk to the other co-chief scientist, decide what to do, take care of all the human relations… And there are things happening, as always. So, in the end, going in the lab and looking at the core, which was what I was looking forward to, didn’t happen other than… Maybe at the beginning you do it, but then when all the reports start coming, you spend most of the time reading reports and editing reports. But this was not a disappointment. It was just, I accepted it as it is.

What I liked most is that you have a chance to have an overview of everything. I would say that in the end, I did not produce scientific papers as I had hoped. I don’t know exactly for which reason. What I would say is that I didn’t have – in OGS, we had as a tool seismic reflection and geophysics, in general. So, our seismic reflection profiles enabled the drilling of that leg, because we planned, I submitted proposals to get money for the site survey, we did the seismic… We did a really good job with the British Antarctic Survey to locate the sites, that were all located, if I remember well, on OGS seismic profiles. This was our strength in the group. So, we enabled the drilling but then – I would say I didn’t know what to do with samples, because in OGS we don’t have laboratories. So, I did some reinterpretation of the seismic, we did some modeling, we did a nice work on the silica genesis derived from the seismics, and validated with the drilling but again, I didn’t have resources to do geochemical analysis or… But I was involved with the other researchers’ job and with Peter Barker, the other co-chief. We worked together on the synthesis.  But, of course, because he was mother language [English], much older and senior than me, the leadership of the synthesis I left to him, because I think it was natural that he would lead the synthesis. It was a very good experience. I really liked it.

BMR: I feel it’s a good example of how collaboration works among co-chiefs.

AC: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes there are also discussions, and that’s also very formative. You realize that in two months on the ship, you have to take decisions and not every time you agree with the other co- chief. And so, you have to argue to defend your ideas, sometimes to try to impose your ideas; other times you acknowledge the other person idea… And this is good. I would advise anyone to have this kind of experience, to learn how to deal with people in a nice way, without coming to a conflict. We never went to a conflict. We had harsh discussions, but never conflicts.

BMR: I think the in scientific ocean drilling, the point of leading together in the isolated space…

AC: Oh yes.

BMR: it helps a lot how to and collaborate, actually, and balance the personal level of conversation with the professional level of conversation.

AC: Scientific drilling, because the expeditions are long and intense… But marine science in general, when you go on a cruise, on an expedition, you must learn how to live together with people in tight space, discussing about priorities and what to in a polite way. Not everyone is able to do that. I have seen big conflicts on vessels. But, yeah, going on a ship in general is something I would make mandatory for any young person. Go out and learn how to live together with people. Respect people, gain respect from others… I think this is what, in the past, the military service for males was meant.

BMR: I was thinking on that, actually, that going on a ship with the Navy or something was probably like that. But with maybe harder parts.

AC: Yeah, without all these bad parts of the military service. If you are in a respectful environment, it is a very positive experience.

BMR: You have witnessed the evolution of the Ocean Drilling Program since the starting of ODP.

AC: Yes.

BMR: So, from your position, especially being a part of the Italian but also ECORD community, how have you witnessed this evolution? And what kind of decision now looking backwards you think it might have been taken differently?

AC: I think the collaboration in Europe that I have seen from the times of the Consortium of the small countries, and the ECORD times in 2003, it worked very well because, again, in this in all these years there were never conflicts. And scientists from different countries, with different level of funding… And the level of funding of the scientific community does not necessarily reflect the scientific value of that community. We know that very well. So, the potential for conflict is very high. There were big discussions but never major conflicts. The good thing is that the European scientists were always able to work together, like on a ship.

On the other… We still suffer in Europe the usual fragmentation of Europe when Europe has to go as Europe. Now, like in the past, we had US, Japan, there was Russia; there were big countries where one government, one ministry, one governance system… They decide. We’ve always been a multitude of different countries with different ideas. And still today we, Europe, is in a big deficit regarding scientific ocean drilling – not scientifically, I’m talking about resources with respect to the others. Yesterday, here, I was discussing with people and I went to see the Gross Domestic Product of the main players, China, US, and Europe. US until yesterday, before the new administration – we will see how it goes – we knew, because it was public, that NSF invested yearly 48 million USD for scientific drilling. China, now it’s public, they have invested in building two vessels, drilling vessels, core repository, the rock drill… So, they’ve done an investment and they said that they put in the system for the management and the participation about 50 or 55 million [USD]. Of course, it’s in their currency, but translated into euros or dollars. And Europe has 15 [million USD] so, one third of each of them. But if you look at the economic power of all these countries together, Europe and China, are almost similar. The US is a bit higher than Europe, but not much; Like the figures I looked yesterday, taken from the press, is that Europe has 16,000 of billions. But Europe, that is without UK. China has 19, and the US has 26. But we invest one third of them. So, it’s our fault. And I think the reason is that in France they talk to France, in Italy they talk to Italy, in the UK they talk to UK.

And we don’t develop a strategy. People say, “Why don’t you use the European Union, then? Which is meant, in theory, to minimize fragmentation”. And the answer, most of the time, is that the mechanism for the management of research infrastructures in Europe, the ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures), would be too complex and too complicated for scientific drilling, where you need flexibility, rapidity… And this is the secret of our success; is that, as a consortium with our own management structure that has been designed for the purpose, we are able to face all these logistical needs and scientific needs of scientific ocean drilling. And from what I know of ESFRI infrastructures, I agree that we would not be able to do it. So, we need something new but we have to talk to Europe. The European Commission as a part of the European Union that funds research, the contacts have been almost, nothing until now. There was a time at the beginning of ECORD that there was some funding from Europe, from – I don’t remember the mechanism; there was some add-on on funding, not much, that John Ludden brought the proposal, but it was just to complement our funding with something. It was not to… But yeah, this is where we should work now.

BMR: I’m always wondering why scientific ocean drilling doesn’t attract that much attention? I mean, if you think it’s one of the largest, if not the largest, programs in Earth sciences, it contributes to all the major topics, it brings together international collaboration that produces papers and brings national prestige… It’s surprising that doesn’t attract that much political attention. Do you have any idea of why?

AC: I have an idea, yes. Is that we do geology at the bottom of the oceans. So, we are hybrid. We are not seen as hardcore geology by the geological community – not all of them, but –and most importantly, ocean science… I would say not at NSF level, because scientific drilling within NSF is under the Department of Oceanography. And this is smart. And I like them, because in the US, oceanography includes geological oceanography, which is what we do. So, I think this is not a big issue, or it was not a big issue, in the United States. In Europe, oceanography is mostly regarded as blue ocean science: physical oceanography, chemical oceanography, biological oceanography. Geology is geology with a hammer. We work at sea, but we do `not have the support of the oceanographic community. I say something that relates to these times. We are organizing this side event at the United Nations Ocean Conference 2025 in Nice. Third of the United Nations Ocean Conference. The Ocean Conference is centered on Sustainable Development Goal 14, which is the one with the sea in it, in the symbol, but under the sea, the waves, there is a fish. It’s about biological resources. It’s about fishery, which is important, okay – for Europe, fishery is important. It’s subsidized; climate change… And another thing that is happening today at European level, there are the Partnerships. They collect a lot of money from different countries, and the commission supplements 30% of the investment of the countries. And there is one on the sustainable blue economy. Great. There is nothing, or almost nothing about, the seafloor. There is nothing about, of course, resources like oil and gas. I agree. There is very little about deep sea mining sometimes, but that’s regarding the nodules in the Pacific. So, it’s not the seafloor, it’s just the seabed with these deep sea potatoes and, of course, all the environmental impact of the eventual exploitation. But, regarding the dynamics of the Earth that you can study down there, the hydrothermal systems that eventually generate the ore deposit, the hazards, the paleoclimate… All we know about paleoclimate is about the oceans. The hazards – if you develop a blue economy, the blue economy must be safe. So, if you lay cables, pipelines, foundations on the seafloor… And the use of the seafloor is growing; you need to know the geology of where you base your infrastructure. But even aquaculture, wind farms… They have to put anchors and… But they are regarded only impact on the ecosystems, impact on trophic level… So, there is a lack of knowledge, I would say scientific culture, and literacy about the geological side of the ocean. In fact, we call this event that we are promoting at the United Nations Ocean Conference, “The ocean hidden below the seafloor”. The ocean doesn’t end at the seafloor. It goes down. And we should put this into the agenda. This has never been done in the past.

I sadly think, and talking to colleagues, others agree, that the ocean drilling community has developed a bubble around themselves. We are a very nice, motivated, knowledgeable community of great scientists that live in a bubble. And outside the bubble, there’s big money. And we either break the bubble, or the bubble will implode sometime, because the resources – except for China, now – the resources towards this are going down in the US, in Europe, in Japan… Now China is in the investing. Probably they have a better vision that we have, at the moment [to invest on this].

BMR: It’s very difficult to find the way to go because there’s not… We should find a place where there’s someone who wants to listen. So now you’re talking about this United Nations meeting; there will be a session organized, and there will be, of course, people attending, but… Are we sure that this people are ready to listen and to invest?

AC: (laughs) No, we are not sure.

BMR: And maybe there’s also some issue regarding communication because, as you said, visualize is very important and with scientific ocean drilling always the problem is that is very difficult for the public to make connection. So you can see a fish and easily understand if the water is dirty, the fish dies…

AC: That’s absolutely true.

BMR: But now try to explain that we study earthquakes drilling after the earthquake. It’s not obvious. Same for paleoclimate, for example; we need to do figures and drawings, to represent it.

AC: One very good example on how to visualize this is the climate stripes that were developed for anthropogenically induced climate change. The blue to red global warming. This was Professor Ed Hawkings, at the University of Reading, in 2018. Someone in the ocean drilling community, and I’m happy to say the name, that is Thomas Westerhold, from Bremen, he developed the same visual concept throughout the Cenozoic where the trend is opposite, because the Earth was cooling naturally, global cooling for 65 million years. And then, men triggered global warming. But the trend of cooling is very nice, if you look at this figure. There are even T-shirts I saw in the EGU General Assembly in Vienna, people wearing the t-shirt of the [stripes]. So, we need to get better. We are doing the IODP achievement document. The idea is to talk to the policymakers in a better way. But the policymakers, the one dealing with the oceans, have mostly a background in oceanography, biological oceanography. I see it in Europe. I served in the JPI Ocean, that is the Joint Programing Initiative on Healthy and Productive Seas and Oceans. Most of the people from the ministries of the European countries have a biological oceanography, oceanographic background, and they have a hard time understanding the geological part of the oceans. It’s not their fault. I mean, they have studied. It’s our responsibility to talk to them and tell them, “Look, we are missing a big part of the ocean if we don’t look at the seafloor”. And I am personally doing this every dinner, every coffee break, every meeting… I pull out the seafloor. And they like it because they discover something new. But it is a slow process. We cannot think that you talked to a guy, and the next day you have billions for scientific drilling.

The responsibility of the scientists on communication towards policymakers is huge. It has been demonstrated by… I have two examples where scientists really made the difference in ocean science: ocean acidification – it was a scientist going to talk to the European Parliament. Nobody even imagined that that by the putting CO2 into the atmosphere, this would go into the oceans and make it more acidic. And they did it. And now, everyone knows about oceans acidification, that they were implementing measures to mitigate the impacts. And microplastics. Microplastics, nobody knew… And the scientists convinced the policymaker. It’s easier because you showed the photograph of debris in the ocean and they understand immediately.

So, it’s our responsibility to talk to them. Now, we are doing this. With IODP³ we have inaugurated, at least in ECORD, an era of talking to policymakers outside our funding agency, who know already what we’re doing and are guaranteeing the funding – which is super –but we need to go beyond that. It will take some time, but it’s either we do it, or they will never study the bottom of the oceans independently. They need to be advised by scientists.

BMR: Or even, if it comes a day when there’s a particular topic that can only be studied with scientific ocean drilling, that day, all the attention will be driven to scientific ocean drilling. But it should be not related to resources or commercial, right?

AC: Well, there is one, not commercial, but resource, yes, the expedition that started today or yesterday is about an abiotic or non-biological resource of the ocean, that is freshwater or aquifers. Many scientists knew that that groundwater from land spreads under the coastline, because the coastline means nothing. I mean, the coastline has varied through time so, if you go back 10,000 years, the coastline was tens of kilometers away. And so, of course, you had groundwater. So, this has a huge impact on what we do, because we drill not for an economic resource. Of course, if this water one day will be used, to supply water in cases of water scarcity as a strategic reservoir, it should not be sold, like other fluids like oil and gas. It should be managed centrally by national administrations. It should not be sold like bottled water, let’s say. Then, we can play a role on strategic mineral resources for batteries, for example, which are not only manganese nodules. There is an environmental impact, but anything we do has an environmental impact. So, we should not ban it only because there is an [environmental impact], we need to try to do it in a sustainable way. And then, there is the hazard, like the earthquake, the submarine slope stability, the tsunami that they induce… There is a lot, and we’ve seen it with the tsunamis. There were already two big tsunamis following earthquakes in the last 20 years. If you look at the history of the Mediterranean Sea, for example – I was involved in the hazards – the Mediterranean Sea is a small ocean so, if anything happens, and we know it happened in the past, even in the very recent past, a tsunami will impact, in about half an hour it will be on the other side of the [basin]. And if it happens in summer, the density of population is huge. In an ocean, it may take a few hours, so you can have a warning system. But a warning system in the Mediterranean is almost useless because by the time you reach a beach, or a city, and you convince the people to get away because there is a tsunami coming, the tsunami is already there. And if you look at the Messina earthquake and tsunami [note: a big earthquake and tsunami that happened in 1980, causing tens of thousands of casualties], most of the of the casualties were produced by the tsunami, not the earthquake. And this was a 100 years ago. It was not 1000 years ago, like the Alexandria of Egypt tsunami that was 2000 years ago. So, this should be enough to convince anyone to look at the bottom of the oceans. But, it is not obvious. It takes time.

BMR: I’m convinced, but (both laugh). Now, to start wrapping up, I’d like to ask you about your reflections now, towards the end of your career. What has been the role that scientific ocean drilling and everything involved has played?

AC: I was thinking about this, in these days and… Scientific ocean drilling and marine geology in general, but the drilling is really what allows you to understand what happens, helped me to develop a career through which I understood that the ocean has no fixed limits, boundaries, because it is connected to the subsurface. It is connected to the continent through the rivers. It’s like roots, or arms of a tree. The ocean is the trunk, and the arms are the rivers, into the continent; and there is the pore water in the hydrothermal circulation that is the ocean extending down the roots. A good part of the salinity of the ocean comes from the hydrothermal systems, that is the ocean going down, absorbing minerals from the from the rocks when the water is in hypercritical conditions, going up and releasing these into the ocean, determining the mineral deposition. So, it’s a continuous exchange. And then there is also a lack of boundary with the atmosphere, because there are the aerosols, there is evaporation… The ocean below the ice shelves, freezes and melts… I’ve developed something that says, “We are understanding the anatomy and the physiology of an endless ocean, endless in time in space”. And at the end of this 30, almost 40 years of my career, I’m quite happy to see that, “Now I understand this.” But this is very selfish thinking. So, one can say, “Who cares, that you know it?”. But through the publications, the projects, the students… I think with the basic help of this scientific drilling for the subsurface part – but with scientific drilling you study also the ice sheets evolution, and you understand how the ocean then the ice integrates. With people modeling erosion and sediment transport, you understand the arming of the ocean into the continents – I came to a stage where I think I understand fairly well this interconnection between the ocean and the rest of the planet. So, as I told you, I may start drafting some ideas for readers that are not necessarily scientists. But yeah, I mean… I hope that one can understand that there is a value in doing research of this kind. It’s not just for the fun of it. It’s fun, you know, but it’s not for the fun.

BMR: I think it’s a very interesting perspective because for you, the seafloor is of course, part of the ocean. We were talking before about this disconnection between the ocean people and the geology people, but it’s part of a… the same whole, the same kind of entity.

AC: I mean, I don’t want to blame the geological community; if you want to do geology with a hammer, you buy your boots, you have a truck, a hammer, and you do field mapping and you understand geology. To do marine geology, you need a lot of money. You need infrastructure. You need the big programs like this. And not every geologist is enabled to access the infrastructure. Like, if I think of our poor country, Italy, where geology is very important – there is a big school of geology – we do not have an oceanographic fleet like, we have a vessel here [pointing to Kaimei], and it is one of 5 or 6 oceanographic vessels. We have a couple of vessels owned by institutes that are run part time working for companies to make money. There is not a strategy to support oceanography, including geological oceanography, allowing the students to go out and learn.

I mean, I teach marine geology, but I cannot take the students out on a cruise. I take them on the ship when the ship is in port, like this, just to say, “Okay, you’ve seen a ship”, but it’s different from going out and doing coring, seismic, geophysical, oceanographic sampling… So, it’s a matter of resources. Geology always been considering a very cheap science. And now that geologists say, “We need money like the physicists, astrophysics” – everyone knows that they need a lot of money, but geology doesn’t break through the policymaking, the governance of science. We work on it.

BMR: Just one more thing, like in ten minutes. In ten years from now – and we are planning the program for the next ten years – where would you like to see the program going, the scientific ocean drilling?

AC: In ten years from now, I would like to see it more accessible to many more scientists and students, especially. We should go back to offer expeditions like it was in the good times of ODP, where there were five expeditions every year. I’m not sure in this moment how to see a technological development but for sure, the monitoring of the seafloor and the subseafloor is important. And here, they do it in Japan. They do it also elsewhere. But still, you need vessels, infrastructures, to drill and deploy instruments, like they are doing on Expedition 501, with this scimpi system. We have to monitor the seafloor, besides sampling it.

BMR: Scientific ocean drilling has always evolved, integrating new communities, new research methods, new technologies… So, probably that will be…

AC: You can deploy the fiber optic cables; now they are monitoring the seafloor already, with the fibers of the communication cables on land. And we should put these fibers in a vertical position, not only in the horizontal position.

BMR: Well, thank you very much. It was great.

AC: Thank you, if you want to continue another day we can do that.