Keir Becker

Beatriz Martinez-Rius (BMR): Today is 28 of September of 2023, we are at the Tokyo office of JAMSTEC. I am Beatriz Martinez-Rius, postdoctoral researcher at JAMSTEC and I am with Keir Becker. Thank you very much for coming all the way to Japan, all the way here.

Keir Becker (KB): Thanks.

BMR: What are you doing now, what is your role? You are a professor at the University of Miami, but are you still related to scientific ocean drilling?

KB: I am actually an Emeritus Professor now. I officially retired December ‘22 from University of Miami, Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmosphere and Earth Science. But Emeritus Professors can still be involved in sciences, so I am here for this NanTroSEIZE synthesis workshop. I am trying to remain interested in sciences and not worry about being funded or anything like that [laughs].

BMR: You have spent all your career, since you graduated, in some way related to scientific ocean drilling. How did you get involved in scientific ocean drilling?

KB: That’s kind of an interesting story. I was a graduate student at Scripps, doing geothermal measurements, and I connected with Dick Von Herzen at Woods Hole to borrow some of his equipment. He had actually been the co-chief scientist of DSDP leg 3, which is the famous leg that verified plate tectonics in the south Atlantic. He was going to be co-chief scientist of leg 70, in the fall of 1979, which was going to go to the Galapagos hydrothermal mounts. I’d done some geothermal work there, using his equipment, in 1979 I think it was, and about three months before the leg, the person who had been scheduled to be the geothermal scientist pulled out. I never learned why… But I got a call to sail in his place, so I said “yes, I’ll come,” and that was my first leg, leg 70, fall of 1979. I was a physical properties scientist, doing heat flow measurements. I was still a graduate student and I got invited a year and a half later onto leg 78B, and I was almost done with my PhD when we went back to the famous hole 395A to do some logging programs. Then… I finished my PhD and a few months later, became half-time research geophysicist at Scripps, and half-time staff scientist at the DSDP.

My first expedition as staff scientist was leg 83, on which we returned to hole 504B, and became famous as the leg that actually for the first time drilled through the pillow basalts of the ocean crust and penetrated into the sheeted dikes below. That was very exciting, to me. I ran an experiment on that leg that actually got me first author in a Nature article, we had two back to back Nature articles on that leg. And then I did one more DSDP leg, leg 92, which went to the East Pacific rise. Co-chief scientists were Dave Rea and Margaret Leinen, who is now director of Scripps, and then, during that leg, they announced the end of DSDP. That was very discouraging. But shortly afterwards, Texas A&M got the funding to run the successor program, the Ocean Drilling Program (ODP), and I ended up going on… I have to count. It might be sixteen [Correction: seventeen] JOIDES Resolution legs, four on the Glomar Challenger… ODP was 102, 109, 111, 118, 137, 139, 148, 158, 168, 174B, 190, 196. Twelve ODP. (laughs) Then in IODP, on the JOIDES Resolution there’s 301, 327, 336, 341S, and 385T. And then I was also co-chief scientist of 380 on Chikyu. So, I think it was about twenty-two expeditions altogether.

BMR: You are probably among the persons who have embarked more times.

KB: Yes.

BMR: And maybe on the three drill ships, because you were already on the Glomar Challenger.

KB: Yeah, right. That’s true [laughs]. One of the few people.

BMR: Going a bit back in time, I am curious to know how the field of geothermal studies was at the time you started?

KB: At the time I started graduate school there had been three, four, big geothermal programs in the US. There was Dick Von Herzen at Woods Hole, Mark Langseth, Roger Anderson and colleagues at Lamont, and there had been John Sclater and Larry Lawver program at Scripps, and a program at the University of Washington with Clive Lister and his graduate students like Earl Davis. But just before I arrived at Scripps, it turned out their equipment was becoming obsolete and very hard to maintain. So, I arrived as Larry was a postdoc leaving to go to MIT, so I had to borrow Dick Von Herzen’s equipment from Woods Hole to do a couple of cruises. One of them, my very first cruise, was actually doing a site survey for DSDP leg 64 in the Guaymas Basin and it turns out that Greg Moore was on that expedition. The site survey also included Miriam Kastner, a geochemist who became involved early in the program. So, I was using Dick’s equipment, and it was because of that that I think I got invited, as I said, on my very first leg and began my career. 

BMR: How was your first experience aboard the Glomar Challenger? What do you remember?

KB: What I remember was, we got to port in Panama only to find that the ship’s DP computer had broken down. And it took them at least a week to fix it. Those days, you probably don’t remember, computers had tubes and things like that. Cathode tubes. All they could do was keep replacing cards and see if they would work. Finally, they got it to work in a week later. So, we left a week later than expected. That’s also back in the days when there was no internet. There were on the ship a few movies and a projector, and it turns out that because of the delay we watched every movie they sent for the leg before we even left [laughs]. But then it was very successful, coring in the Galapagos mounts. We kind of finished that work early, so we had extra time and we decided to divert off to this famous 504B because the previous leg  started it, with success drilling through the sediments and through the uppermost crust. So we returned there, drilled another – I forget how it was – almost 300 meters; also lots of adventures losing pipes and fishing them out… So, it was fun. And then, we were about to come in just before Christmas, but with the week’s delay we came on December 23^rd into Callao in Peru. And they said, well, we’ll make just one change for each of your reservations and that’s it. But they got me out of there.

BMR: Was it your first time working with foreign scientists, non-US scientists?

KB: Yes, it was. Actually, I still remember, the Japanese scientist on board was named Shun-ichiro Karato. He was from ORI at that time. And a few years after that, he moved to the States and he is now professor at Yale University. That was a good connection. We did a lot together in the physical properties program and geothermal measurements. We have some co-authored papers in JGR back in the early eighties based on that.

BMR: So the collaboration with the Japanese kind of started in those early days.

KB: In those early days. In the first six years, DSDP was a purely American program, it was called the National Ocean Sediment Coring program; but around 1974 they expanded the membership of JOIDES to American institutions, and also international members started joining. Japan joined in 1975. As a member you had the right to send one or two scientists on each expedition. Although Challenger did not have that many berths so it was probably a problem…

BMR: I would like to ask you about something that happened a bit later in time, and it’s the issue of securing the Explorer, the drillship of the CIA that was supposed to be transformed into a riser drillship. Because I know that you were participating actively in scientific ocean drilling in the transition from DSDP to ODP. How did you experience that situation? And what exactly happened at that moment? Who suggested the Explorer?

KB: Actually I wasn’t that involved in [planning the transition] those days, I was just a scientist in those days. As I recall, there was a big push to get the Glomar Explorer and the program was going to be called OMDP. It was so much bigger than the Challenger and it had the capability to drill deep in the ocean margins. I don’t know why it didn’t happen. At some point it must have been the NSF making the decision. Actually, I know someone that may know, I’m going to see him. He lives in Santa Fe where I have a second home and I will see him in a couple of weeks. So I will ask him. He was involved in the program management for scientific ocean drilling at NSF during those days. Otherwise, I wasn’t involved that much. I was more concerned that the Glomar Challenger, DSDP, was being finished and what to do after that.

BMR: I was asking this because this ship was supposed to be a riser drillship for scientific ocean drilling programs, which has been a pipe dream for scientists until Chikyu.

KB: Right, that’s true. I actually don’t know much about the capabilities of the Glomar Explorer, but actually I guess they had to design it as a riser ship, to become a drillship for the real purpose.

BMR: We can talk a little bit about your time at ODP. How did the community of scientists grow in the US, during the time of ODP? And how did you relate to other international scientists?

KB: I think that at the American community, some people didn’t like the decision of ending DSDP at Scripps, but the JOIDES Resolution did turn out to be more capable that the Glomar Challenger, so the community was quite more involved actually in ODP that they were in DSDP. In ODP, they made the effort to make it a thematically driven program, with a formal proposal process. Any expedition required a proposal, which wasn’t always the case at DSDP. During DSDP the people in the committees could actually design expeditions themselves, and get them on the schedule. But in ODP, there was a thematic basis and a community advisory panel structure to evaluate the proposals. It also started with not just thematic panels but also regional panels, to design drilling schedules based on the input of the three or four thematic panels. It was more of a community-driven program. So, it was good. In the twenty year’s history of ODP, they went through several redesigns of the scientific advisory structure, but it always worked pretty well. And I think… To me, the lesson there was that there was no perfect advisory panel or structure. There were only good people, you know, who made good decisions.

BMR: Since the start of ODP, you have been a member of the Tectonics Panel. Is that right? JOIDES Tectonic Panel.

KB: Yes, for a while.

BMR: How did you get appointed in that position?

KB: Well, that’s because of personal connections. In a way… I said that 70 was my first leg, with co-chief scientist Dick Von Herzen, and the other co-chief scientist was named Jose Honnorez. He is an alteration petrologist who was at the University of Miami at that time. So, he became the chairman of the Planning Committee, I think, in 1985 [Correction: 1983]. And it was his job to basically populate the thematic panels. So he asked me to be on the tectonics panel, as I was moving to Miami. So, again, personal connections; he ended up going to Strasbourg later but I stayed at the University of Miami. I was always kind of in the Downhole Measurements Panel the first ten years, after two years of the Tectonics Panel, I became the liaison to Lithosphere Panel, and there… They wanted to put me on several panels, but someone made the rule that you could only be in one or two [laughs], so… I was associated with the Tectonics Panel when I first met Taira-san, for example. That would have been in the mid-1980s. At the Lithosphere Panel I met… his name is escaping me. He was CIB chair during covid… Tatsumi-san, yes. He was on the Lithosphere Panel. So lots of people, Japanese scientists on either the drillship or on the panels. It was an amazing experience in terms of plenty of young scientists, in terms of developing international contacts that would last for the rest of your scientific career.

BMR: What was your role, what was the role of the Tectonics and the Lithosphere panels?

KB: There was another thematic panel at that time called Ocean History, I think. It was the  Sediments and Ocean History (or something like that) Panel. Our role was basically to evaluate proposals that had been submitted in those three themes, and also to try to encourage proponents when we saw a gap in the proposal brochure. One, for example, that concerned myself… 504B had been very successfully drilled during DSDP and was very ripe to deepen, and they needed a lead proponent for a proposal. So the [Lithosphere] panel proposed me to be lead proponent because I had been staff scientists on the last drilling expedition, to 504B, so I spent a couple of weeks when I first went to Miami, writing that proposal and submitting it. And it eventually got scheduled.

BMR: Did you go onboard?

KB: I was called on to be co-chief scientist on that, one of the benefits of being lead proponent. The other co-chief scientist was from Japan, Hitoshi Sakai, he has passed away.

BMR: What was the number of that leg?

KB: Leg 111.

BMR: Ok, Costa Rica rift.

KB: Yes. And who else was on that leg… Jimmy Kinoshita was on that leg. He had been on leg 83, that’s how I met him. He and I shared a cabin on the Glomar Challenger. Harue Masuda was on leg 111, as well as Jimmy. She will be in the workshop next week.

BMR: What were you doing as scientific research in those times, what were your scientific interests?

KB: I started my PhD in 1976 geothermal measurements on the seafloor. Hydrothermal vents were discovered in 1977 and 1978, so it was the perfect time to get into the ground floor of geophysical studies of hydrothermal processes. That was my main interest in the early days, the early phase of my involvement in scientific ocean drilling. This was using downhole measurements trying to understand hydrothermal processes. And I got hooked into a very big opportunity, which had been pioneered by a Canadian scientist named Roy Hyndman in some of the earlier crustal drilling legs in the Atlantic, when he noticed that when they logged holes that were drilled through the sediments into the uppermost basement, they were getting very cool temperatures. They deduced that ocean bottom water was being drawn down the cased section through the sediment and into the uppermost basement. Also, they immediately deduced that the permeability of the basement beneath the sediment must be much greater than the permeability of the sediments. And when we first went to 504B, on leg 70, and then again on 83, we were careful to make geothermal measurements down in the hole before starting the drilling again, because the drilling process disturbs the thermal state in the borehole. And that provided enough data to actually quantify the rate at which ocean bottom water was flowing down the hole; and if we can deduce into what zones the downflowing water enters in the formation, we could actually estimate the permeability of the formation. That was my early interest in using scientific ocean drilling to understand hydrothermal processes. These holes were around young crust on the flanks of the ridges, not right at the ridge crests or black smoke hydrothermal vents. And so, in those days, we started to demonstrate that lower temperature, hydrothermal circulation of off-axis settings, was equally important as the black smoke or hydrothermal circulation at ridge crust in terms of heat transfer, and actually geothermal, geochemical, alteration of the crust.

BMR: Were there any technological limitations at that time to study that kind of thing?

KB: This led us to the realization that… You are drilling these holes into these active hydrothermal systems and ocean bottom water was flowing down the holes into the systems, so that was at the very least a significant perturbation, if not a total disturbance to the system we are trying to study. So that led us in the late eighties to come up with this idea of sealing the hole and suspending instruments in the sealed hole, with data loggers accessible on the seafloor. That became what we know now as the CORK hydrogeological observatory. This idea first… I think we first started discussing it in 1987 at a USSAC workshop on wireline reentry of scientific ocean drilling holes, that was convened by Fred Spiess and Mark Langseth at Scripps, and that’s where I first started working on this with Earl Davis. So, we started talking about this idea, and we got a lot of encouragement two years later at a joint Lithosphere Panel meeting, Downhole Measurements Panel meeting, at the German KTB drill site. Earl and I, and a third person named Bobb Carson, who came from the subduction zone drilling community, we had dinner and sketched the idea literally on a dinner napkin. Earl kept that napkin and went home and made a nice, actual formal drawing of it. So we proposed it to NSF. I was the lead PI with Bobb and Earl, who were the co-PI and a sort of Canadian co-PI. This sketch was basically the centerpiece of the proposal. NSF immediately liked the idea. We thought, at the time, that it was like a three-year project and see what happens; and it became a career, basically. Using boreholes for downhole, long-term observatories. At the same time, seismologists started to get interested in the same approach. So they had a sort of parallel pathway in terms of adapting downhole long-term instruments – seismographs – down in the boreholes for a long term seismological observatories. People like Kiyoshi Suyehiro were involved in that.

BMR: Before we continue talking about this, I would like to ask you if you can expand a bit more about this relation with NSF. Sometimes one gets the feeling that the NSF is a unity, but I would like to know in more detail with whom you related, or how you got a proposal to get approved.

KB: That’s a good question. I can remember when I was a graduate student at Scripps, NSF did a site visit. They don’t normally do site visits these days, but they made a site visit and… Don Heinrichs came along with Bruce Malfait. You guys know those names. They actually took some graduate students out to dinner. It was a huge experience, just talking to them, informally getting to know them. So after that, if I had an idea for a proposal, I could call them up. And they knew who I was, gave me good advice. They couldn’t promise to fund anything, but… I mean, they were very strict at NSF about sending proposals out for independent peer review… but they were very helpful in terms of guiding young scientists like me through the formal process of submitting proposals. And if they turned them down, they were also helpful in what could be done to improve  a proposal to meet the standard and get funded.

BMR: Why were they so supportive of scientific ocean drilling?

KB: Well, I like to think that I was lucky in many ways in my career, and one of the other ones was that… You know, NSF and ONR had started being interested in ocean sciences after World War 2, and plate tectonics was proposed and generally accepted in the 1960s, so there was a lot of interesting work to be done. I think of myself as being lucky and being at the tail end, coming into the system at the tail end of the golden age in ocean sciences, where any really good idea would get supported somehow, from either ONR or NSF. It’s tougher now. It is tougher. And of course, scientific ocean drilling had only just started. Well, DSDP started in 1968, and there was Project Mohole in 19… I think they drilled in 1961, was it? But then, it was when JOIDES, the JOIDES project, started in 1964 and finally evolved into DSDP starting in 1968. So, NSF was very supportive of that. And at the time, the community was smaller and the funding base was strong, so it was not as competitive and as difficult to fund a proposal then as it is now. So they had the resources to support almost all good proposals. It was… My daughter just got her PhD and, you know, it was so much easier for my generation to consider going into the academic sciences than it is for hers. It’s very tough for this generation.

BMR: Right. so maybe we can go back…

KB: Sure.

BMR: To where we left the thread. At some point you mentioned that the community of seismologists were interested in starting to do borehole measurements.

KB: Yes.

BMR: And you were part of, let’s call it… how would you call it, the hydro…

KB: hydrogeology?

BMR: Yes, the hydrogeology community.

KB: Yes.

BMR: So, how these different communities of scientists related and kind of aligned their interests for scientific ocean drilling at that time?

KB: During ODP, they formed a program planning group called Long-term Observatories Program Planning group. That’s a little bit later in the process, Kiyoshi Suyehiro and I co-chaired it. Our mandate was to sort of design a future program for the long-term observatories using scientific ocean drilling holes. But early in the days, seismologists were interested, and my colleagues and I were interested in using the boreholes for hydrogeological measurements, so it was just, again, a matter of…probably through the Downhole Measurements Panel that we realized this common interest. There were seismologists like Ralph Stephen, Fred Duennebier on that panel; I was on the panel, Earl Davis… People like that. And so, we realized we had common interest in utilizing boreholes for complementary objectives, really, and we didn’t formally join forces in proposals, but it all worked out, in a sense.

BMR: Let me explain my thoughts and then formulate the question.

KB: Sure.

BMR: I was thinking that in those groups and meetings, you met people from very different countries including Japan, but also the UK, Germany, France… Probably people interested in the same scientific questions and maybe on expanding the uses of boreholes. How did the technology and the resources that you had in the US, at that time, diverged or were similar to the technological capabilities that were available in other parts of the world, in other countries involved in scientific ocean drilling?

KB: That’s an interesting question, let’s see… Once we kind of had the basic design of the CORK borehole observatory, other scientists could actually propose to their own funding agencies to construct the scientific measurement equipment that went down in the hole. Basically the way it worked early on was that the drilling program would provide what we called the infrastructure: the reentry cone, the CORK body, that sat in the top of the wellhead and sealed it… But the scientists had to get the funding for the instruments that went down in the hole. So, NSF funded the initial rounds for a first set of CORKS, the Geological Survey of Canada actually funded the construction of the data loggers that we used. NSF plus GSC funding. In one of the earliest subduction zone CORKs, a French group was interested in instrumenting it; so a group of IFREMER, led by Jean Paul Fouchet, got French funding to deploy the instruments in that one hole. We had been schedulted to instrument two holes, and we had NSF funding for the other hole… It worked well, that cooperation. The other thing I hadn’t mentioned yet about the borehole observatories is that most of them, all of them, back then, were not connected to submarine cables. So you had to use an ROV or HOV to return to the instruments and somehow get the data, and perhaps put new downhole instruments in the hole, replenish the batteries…things like that. So in this one case, that it was the Barbados CORKs, one set of instruments was funded by France, IFREMER, the other set by NSF. The French also supported a dive program using their submarine, research submarine, the Nautile. Those boreholes were actually too deep for the US research submarine Alvin, which had a limit of 4,500 meters then. They were at 4,900 meters or something like that. NSF actually also helped support the use of the French submersible assets to extract [data and instruments], so… It complicated coordination in a way, but it has worked, because of personal contacts and because of support of the funding agencies. Now the boreholes off, say, the NanTroSEIZE, the instrument boreholes, are connected up to the DONET cable. So that provides power and access to data. But some of these instruments are pretty modern, in those days, when we couldn’t actually connect to the cables, we had to go down with submarines.

BMR: What were the results of these first CORK experiments?

KB: So the very first ones were installed in Middle Valley, which is a sedimented spreading center that’s part of the Juan de Fuca system. They were installed into a very high-temperature hydrothermal system, 260 to 300 degrees centigrade. There were two aspects of the instruments: there was pressure monitoring, which is done by having a pressure gauge on the seafloor and one just below the seal, at the top of the hole; and then there was a thermistor cable which was run down into the hole. It’s almost impossible to make a thermistor cable to stand 300 degrees Celsius, so those did not… We would have had to spend a million dollars [laughs]. So those did not, actually, survive very well. But the pressure monitoring was very successful. We had one borehole very close to a vent field, another one a couple of kilometers away – 1.6 kilometers, I think it was – and the one in the hydrothermal zone had a significant overpressure, where you would expect to have up flown fluids, the other one had a significant under pressure, so there’s a pressure differential that means that we’d been actually monitoring the flow and circulation of the water.

BMR: Was this the basis for future research of this style?

KB: Yes, that’s the only isolation we’ve done in an actual spreading center setting. Although Chikyu has deployed instruments in the Okinawa Trough, in the same kind of sedimented spreading center situation, and has also been quite successful… But most of our ocean crust CORKs deployed during ODP and IODP were in the ridge flank settings in the crust. They were about one to… about eight million years old. And that doesn’t have such an extreme temperature challenge. Those thermistor cables and pressure monitoring worked pretty well; and over the years, the geochemist and then the microbiologist started to join us in suspending instruments down in the hole or having instruments installed at the wellhead with tubing running down into the hole, and this has been a very successful collaboration… It has made the installations much more complicated that the original idea, but it has mostly worked, I guess.

BMR: I’m really interested in underwater observatories and on the fact that people from different expertise and scientific communities can collaborate returning to the same borehole. I am interested in this evolution of more scientific disciplines starting to work on the same borehole… not directly by retrieving sediments, but by studying the hole itself.

KB: Yes. I have to admit, initially my colleague Earl Davis and I were hesitant about joining with geochemists and then the microbiologist because, especially the microbiologists, need to process a big volume of fluids to get enough samples to analyze for genetics, and just for what microbes are there. That was the original objective. Our worry was that if they were pumping so much volume of fluids out of the hole, they could be disrupting the pressure state that we were trying to sense. But it turned out that in the ocean crust settings, the upper ocean crust is so permeable and so transmissive that even when they were allowing free flow and sampling a big volume of fluids, they weren’t actually disrupting the pressures. So after some initial reluctance, we realized that it wasn’t really a problem [laughs]. So then… initially these extra objectives were kind of add-ons, on top of the design. Once we realized that we got through that initial stage, it became easier to just work together in designing the installation from the start. That’s what led to the evolution of some of the CORK designs. At this point there are five or six, or seven, different designs that have evolved from that initial one. I can’t explain their evolution here but… Sometimes it gets more and more complicated, and more expensive, but for the most part they have worked pretty well.

BMR: Are they used only for scientific ocean drilling, or is the oil industry or other partners using them?

KB: We had interactions with some oil industry people because they do a lot of reservoir monitoring, which is very similar. They have instruments down in the hole, they monitor pressures at multiple depths… So they know how to do it. They have much bigger budgets than scientific monitoring scientists [laughs] because once they are producing a reservoir, they are making money. And it pays off for them to be monitoring. They’ve also inspired a lot of our technological developments that are, in some ways, a lot simpler than what they do. Yes.

BMR: Maybe we can move a little bit towards the end of ODP.

KB: Yes.

BMR: I would like to ask you, towards the end of the program, probably around the early 90s, there was no firm commitment on continuing with scientific OD from the NSF side. I would like to learn a little bit about the perspective from American scientists who were involved at that moment in scientific ocean drilling.

KB: Ok. One basic thing to realize is… NSF can’t budget for say, a ten or twenty-year program. They have to go in kind of five-year increments. So actually, through the twenty years of ODP, we went through several phases, rewriting the long range plan, compiling the results to date…to help NSF justify another five-year renewal. So that was kind of a recurring regular process that the community and NSF went through, and they cooperated to get renewal of ODP for the next five-year phase of ODP. That kind of came to an end in 2003. But at the same time, ten years before then, there were a lot of interests in Japan in developing a riser drilling program, and contributing that to a new program; and there started to be interest in the European side, in terms of contributing other platforms that could go where neither drillship could go. So… I think [there was] lots of support from the community, with the time. There was a lot of community involvement in workshops held in Japan, in support to developing a riser drilling capability, and workshops in the US in terms of continuing the riserless capability. And there were also international workshops in Europe about contributing a mission specific platform capability, that started in the late nineties, basically. Then there was a big, you know… It was a pretty complicated history. I mean, I know [laughs], the funding agencies just got together to form a coordinating group, I think they called it International Working Group.

BMR: Yes.

KB: They would meet every few months to try to construct a framework in which we could have a more complicated integrated ocean drilling program than ODP had been. Three different kinds of platforms and… you know, they would meet every few months, for several years, and develop the whole platform, the framework, for IODP. So, there was lots of support in the community at the time, there was also hope that… funding would increase enough to support full time operation with all these platforms. So… That’s jumping ahead a little bit, because it turns out funding was not sufficient and so there were limits on what the program could do in IODP. But there was lots of real optimism at the starting, around 2000, and leading up to the beginning of IODP in 2003.

BMR: A little bit back in time, how did you first know about the Japanese plan to build a drillship?

KB: Um… I can’t remember the exact time that it became evident. But you know, by that time I’m pretty well connected to other Japanese scientists so it must… I can’t pinpoint at the exact… Maybe these guys now, Nobu?

Nobu Eguchi (NE): I don’t know. there’s the CONCORD Meeting…

KB: But before that there’s a riser workshop.

NE: That’s right.

KB: That JAMSTEC organized, and one of my colleagues from RSMAS was invited to that. That’s probably when we first started to learn about the interest. And I can’t remember when that workshop was held. It would have been… early-nineties?

BMR: I think one was about 1996, maybe, but before it was announced at EXCOM and PCOM, around 93-94.

KB: Ok. I was a PCOM member in the early-nineties, so probably that’s when we first learned it. It was the Japanese… Taira-san was the Japanese member, yes, so that’s probably when we first learned. 

BMR: What was the first reaction from the American community?

KB: I think there was lots of interest. There are things that the JOIDES Resolution can’t do, so… People interested in margins, subduction zones, even the ocean crust, because to drill really deep into the ocean crust you need a riser capability, some sort of return capability would be required. Yes. And there was also, in those days I was liaison to TEDCOM, and they were trying to explore the implications of riser drilling from a drillship in deep water. Yes, so it was in the early nineties when we started to learn, yes.

BMR: You were chairman of the JOIDES Engineering Development Review Committee.

KB: That was…that was a complicated situation. The purpose of that committee was not to look forward for what engineering developments are required for scientific ocean drilling. It was based specifically to evaluate how Texas A&M ODP operator office was handling engineering development and it was motivated in part because of the difficulties that had been encountered in trying to develop a diamond coring system for zero age drilling suspended from the JOIDES Resolution.

BMR: So it was not related to the scientific, the technological advancements for the future for scientific ocean drilling.

KB: Not really, it was more an assessment of how the Texas A&M JOIDES Resolution operator was handling internally engineering development.

BMR: From reading all these documents on the organization of scientific ocean drilling, I’ve seen precisely that from the US side there were constantly lots of committees, advisory groups and advisory boards, reports… I was wondering, how the US system was organized for scientific ocean drilling? How were these small committees formed to advise on what, and to whom?

KB: Right. At one point, USSAC started with ODP. The United States Scientific Advisory Committee. And at some point early in ODP, they kind of took over the nominations of US scientists for the various committees in-house. Initially, when ODP was formed, I think… for example, I told you that the PCOM chairman, Jose Honnorez, first nominated me to the Tectonics Panel. So, there was more… The JOIDES office had control over soliciting for nominations. I think they probably asked the international partners to name people, but it would also suggest people as well. I think it continued to work that way, they would ask; but then in the US, USSAC started taking a larger and larger role, nominating the members to the various committees. I guess each member country of ODP also had some kind of organization charged with nominating the members to the panels. It was quite complicated, actually, when we switched from ODP to IODP. We had to organize an interim science advisory structure. Because I was SciCOM chair at that time, I was asked to help organize the nominations for the new interim science advisory structure for IODP. So that was…an interesting coordination problem, trying to be… with each of those program member officers (that’s what we call them now, but they were not quite called then)…to interact with them, and ask them to nominate the members and at the same time get the balance of expertise as well.  There was discussion whether, in IODP, each of the three main contributors, the US, Japan and Europe, would each have five or seven members on each panel. There was some tension about that, but eventually it was seven. So we started with pretty big panels, of 21 members. But it was good [laughs]. It was also a great opportunity for young scientists, especially in Japan and Europe, to get involved. Because Japan had to nominate seven members to each panel, and actively involve scientists to do that. And again, this panel membership as well as participating in the expeditions is an incredible opportunity in terms of career development for an ocean scientist. We are worried if we might lose some of that in the next phase of scientific ocean drilling.

BMR: Can you please explain to me, with a bit more detail, about this transition between ODP to IODP? The years of transition from one program to another, from the organizational point of view.

KB: Sure. Basically…the International Working Group set up an interim science advisory structure for IODP. IODP was going to start in 2003, but some sort of interim planning structure had to start in 2001, so that they would be ready and could schedule starting in 2003. Because the membership and funding were going to be so different in IODP, the idea was that we could not ask the JOIDES structure to act in that interim planning capability, because there was going to be a different balance of membership. So we had to start setting up this interim science advisory structure, and they would basically meet during those two years in conjunction with the JOIDES panel of a similar function. At the time I was SciCOM chair, and we would have meetings, you know, for five days of the week. We had three days of SciCOM, or two and a half days, and then two and a half days of the interim planning science committee for IODP. And so there were lots of common members, but there were [also] some new members for the interim science planning committee. That same kind of thing happened with the Science Steering and Evaluation Panel, right? There would be interim Interior SSEP, and interim environmental SSEP, meaning, in conjunction with the JOIDES, two SSEP panels.

BMR: What was the biggest challenge or the biggest difficulty?

KB: I don’t recall much of a difficulty other than, you know, the time it took for the people who ran both, who were involved in both [laughs]. There was a little bit of difficulty in trying to keep, you know, say, the SciCOM focused on ODP and not trying to make statements about the new program. But that was just a matter of management of the agenda and so and a little bit of… you know, there are occasionally things that needed to be discussed by both panels and so I recall working with them.

BMR: Were you the chairman of those meetings?

KB: I was the chairman of SciCOM, but it was Ted Moore and Jimmy Kinoshita [who] were co-chairs of the interim Planning Committee (iPC).

BMR: How did you see the continuity or discontinuity between one program and the other?

KB: I think almost everyone was working trying to make it, make the continuity as smooth as it could be.

BMR: Already thinking of having three platforms, or at least two platforms?

KB: By 2001 it was clear that there would be three different platforms, yes. So, yes, trying to devise a panel structure that could, somehow…coordinate planning for all three was the challenge at the time. Of course, that changed when we went to the second ten years of IODP…

BMR: So please continue, I think I stopped you. You were going to say something about the transition, right?

KB: Well, by the end of the first ten years of IODP it was clear that, you know, funding was not matching the expense of operating all the platforms. And then changes were made; one of the motivations of course was to be more frugal with the funding, right? So that ended up, basically, eliminating the central management organization IODP-Mi, which had been a centerpiece of planning for the first ten years of IODP. The decision was made by the funding agencies, I guess, that we wouldn’t have a central management organization. And therefore those funds could go more directly to supporting the platforms. But that also meant, in the second ten years of IODP, [that] there were kind of independent facility boards set up to recommend schedules for the three different platforms. So there was the JOIDES Resolution Facility Board, Chikyu IODP Board, and the ECORD Facility Board. I was also asked to be the first chairman of the IODP Forum, which was some kind of high-level committee in IODP in the second phase of IODP, but didn’t actually have any power. That was the only place in which everyone could talk and try to work things out. So, as IODP Forum chairman, I was going to all the facility board meetings, and trying to make sure everything was working properly, even though I had no power.

BMR: You mentioned a mismatch of funding between, if I understood correctly, the planning of the first phase of IODP and towards the end of IODP 1. What was the reason, the cause of this mismatch?

KB: I think this was a complicated situation. I believe fuel costs rose much more rapidly than anticipated, so it turned out to be much more expensive to run Chikyu than anticipated… And early in IODP, the JOIDES Resolution went through a huge shipyard refit, they made the whole lab stack and accommodation stack, which ended up being more expensive and more time-consuming than expected. So…by the end of that first phase of IODP, it became clear that the JOIDES Resolution could only operate in four or five expeditions per year instead of six; Chikyu could do… I don’t know what the exact amount was, but maybe one riser program… or riserless project per year…

NE: Something like that, yes. Some years it made three riserless, but…

KB: Yes. And another reason traces back to the early… It’s easier to fund a facility construction in some ways than it is to anticipate what the total operation cost will be and fund that at the same time, to project that funding, so… You know, Chikyu’s construction was funded, that was a big thing, a major national budget item that was part of the economic stimulus in Japan and… but to also get the commitment for full support of the operating costs is difficult. And another reason also goes to… It’s complicated. To the financial structure the first phase of IODP had. There were platform operating costs and science operating costs, and the science operating cost would be funneled through IODP-Mi; the platform operating cost would be covered by the country or consortium that was providing the platform, and so that’s…well, complicated. Too complicated.

BMR: And science-wise, how was the relation of planning and expectations at the beginning of IODP 1, and towards the end?

KB: Well, at the beginning of IODP we were expecting to have one MSP expedition every year, full time JOIDES Resolution operations, six expeditions per year, and…do lots of riser drilling with the Chikyu. So there was, for the Chikyu riser drilling, a big effort at stimulating proposals, you know, in terms of seismogenic zone drilling. There was a full expectation that NanTroSEIZE and CRISP [Costa Rica Seismogenesis Project], for example, would be drilled in the first ten years of IODP. And there was…lots of interest in multiple Arctic expeditions coming through the years, and they ended up being much more expensive than anticipated, because, partly because of the cost of icebreakers. So, in all…it grew more and more evident through IODP that that financial structure was not going to work well. And with this funneling of science operating costs through IODP-Mi, I think, the funding agencies felt that they were losing control over operation of the platforms that they were supporting, and they wanted more control.  Partly, because one of the underlying motivations for eliminating the central management organization was for having their own kind of partnership relationships. For example, if international partners wanted to join the JOIDES Resolution operations, then there was a cost set for that, and a certain berth allocation, and panel member seats, and things like that. And likewise, Chikyu can…CDEX can get international partners, right? So… yes. Similar to being some sort of partner with the MSP. So, it was a bit bewildering for the scientific community, but…we figured out, after a while [laughs].

BMR: From your perspective, since you started collaborating with Japanese researchers from the early 1980s to the IODP, how has the cooperative relationship with Japanese experts changed or evolved?

KB: I think it’s always been good. I mean for example… I’m not quite sure what I’m going to say… It’s always been good. Now there are younger and younger scientists joining the collaborations and I guess my longest link with a Japanese collaborator is with Hajimu Kinoshita, Jimmy Kinoshita. We were roommates on leg 83 in 1981, and… we still worked together, and then we were on the Downhole Measurements Panel together in the early 1980s, and so forth. I think my first time in Japan was about 1985 or 1986. It might have been for a Downhole Measurements Panel that Jimmy organized, that was held at the ORI. It might have been for the Kaiko international conference on subduction zones, which happened in 1986. I can’t quite remember when I first came but… but I’ve always worked and known Jimmy, since then. And for example, in the transitions between programs, Jimmy was one of the co-chairs of the Interim Planning Committee for the transition from ODP to IODP, so we worked closely together, especially when it came to nominating Japanese scientists for the Interim Science Advisory Structure. I actually stopped here one day, for one day, on my way to my first SciCOM meeting, and we had a meeting… Kiyoshi Suyehiro was there, Taira-san… I think maybe Eguchi-san?

NE: No, that was before I came.

KB: So it would have been 2001, in Funabashi. So I’ve always worked closely with Jimmy, and we’ve always been lifelong friends, so… [laughs] I try to see him every time I come to Japan.

BMR: This is a sort of more general question, like a parenthesis in the story… In previous interviews, we were mentioning how there were some cultural differences, especially at the beginning, between US scientists and Japan (I guess that also with other communities), and how this was kind of solved in meetings.

KB: Yes.

BMR: Si I wanted to ask you about your perspective on this.

 KB: That was…quite clear when I was Planning Science Committee chairman, half-way through the first IODP. We were seven members for each of Japan, US, and ECORD, maybe five at that point… five, five, five, in the Science Planning Committee. [Correction: At the time (2006-2007) the membership balance was 7 Japan, 7 US, 4 ECORD, and 1 each for associate members China and Korea.] And often in discussions, very few Japanese scientists would speak up. So, somebody advised me (maybe it was Mike Coffin, who was the previous chairman of the Science Planning Committee when he was in Japan), so yes, he advised me to actually call around the room and ask every panel member, committee member, for their point of view when we were discussing very important topics. So, I found that a very good technique for bringing out what the Japanese members thought as individuals, to encourage them to speak out. I think it was good, in terms of getting them to vote what they really felt, personally, as opposed to… There was suspicion early on in IODP that each side was going to organize themselves and think as a block. But I am sure that there were discussions held before formal committee meetings, but I never saw any evidence that different groups were voting as blocks. I haven’t been to any kind of panel meetings recently, I don’t know; the last experience was at the CIB probably, and Japanese members were quite outspoken so…

BMR: Talking about this first period of IODP, let’s focus there for a couple more questions. I wanted to go back to what you mentioned… At the beginning of IODP, there was a period of optimism towards the future of scientific ocean drilling, with the idea of the turn of the century and the earth sciences of the future. I wanted to ask you to explain to me a bit more how that period of optimism felt. What was your perspective on the future of scientific ocean drilling, at that time?

KB: Oh, that time I saw it as a member of SPC… That’s a complicated story. I was originally not going to be a member of SPC, but one of the American members, Jamie Austin, was called to go to an interim management role, with IODP-Mi, and so I replaced him on SPC, as vice-chair of SPC. So, I was vice-chair when Mike Coffin was chair. And at that level, the optimism I saw became evident when we were voting for ranking proposals. Optimism, at that time, we were formally ranking NanTroSEIZE and always that voted, cleared number one. So there was optimism that that could be done; and optimism for example for Arctic drilling, ACEX also… I can’t remember the actual ranking of ACEX, NanTroSEIZE was two or whatever, but there’s a lot of optimism in that, regarding… Complicated, challenging programs were rated highly. At the SEP level, they were rated highly because there was not the concern, in those optimistic early days, that finances would limit… I mean, what could be done. But that started to become clear when… at the Operations Task Force, that would meet in conjunction with the Science Planning Committee, operators would express concerns about the cost of the programs, and…wish for easier programs to be drilled, like I said. But they didn’t have a voice to say that, when the Science Planning Committee was actually ranking the proposals.

BMR: Why is that?

KB: It was similar at the end of ODP, when I was SciCOM chair and we were ranking pretty ambitious programs quite high. For whatever reason the way of structure was set up, they – the representatives from the Texas A&M JOIDES Resolution operator – didn’t find it was right for them to point out the potential cost and problems before the science ranking that the Science Committee voted on. But then it would come out at the operations, OPCOM it was called, Operations Committee. So it was a little bit awkward, you know, why don’t you say that before and that kind of stuff, right? If you can’t do it, just tell us [laughs]… I forgot what the question was, then.  [laughs]

BMR:  [laughs] We have started talking about this period of optimism, and then we have moved to this, more ambitious missions that were ranked first.

KB: right.

BMR: How was the public support, as far as you know in the US, for scientific ocean drilling?

KB: That, I am not really equipped to answer, public support. I don’t know…how to assess public support? But… Except, there’s the JOIDES Resolution budget operating cost. It was big enough, I think, to be a line item in the Congressional budget, with discussions at the Congressional level. If they went back to their constituents to ask about their support, I don’t know that, but I think there were several calls from the community to indicate their support to the Congressional members. That’s not necessarily what you mean by public support, that’s scientific community support, right? That’s the scientists who contact the offices  of their representatives, or something like that.

BMR: It’s true that it is difficult to assess public support in the sense of how wider audiences are supporting; maybe it’s easier to see for instance how the press is publishing about scientific ocean drilling.

KB: Yes.

BMR: …In which kind of direction, or even if there’s open opposition to scientific ocean drilling, for example.

KB: Well, I mean, this is one of the tricky subjects that…there was a big debate of whether we should handle within the science advisory structure or the management structure for the drilling program, or separately by the platform operators and funding agencies for outreach contribution. So I think that now it should rest more on the country basis, or operator basis, PMO basis; whereas initially, in the eighties and nineties, there was a coordinated public outreach. But that, I think, has been moved to the individual operators and funding agencies. So, for example, in the US there’s a lot of effort publicizing the JOIDES Resolution. In Japan, there’s a lot of effort in publicizing Chikyu operations, Chikyu TV and things like that. JOIDES Resolution’s Facebook page… I am kind of old fashioned so I don’t have Facebook, but [laughs] they do that. So again, I am not the person to assess public support.

BMR: Before moving into more general questions, I would like to ask you about the legs on which you embarked onboard Chikyu and especially NanTroSEIZE, because you were co-chief, right?

KB: Right.

BMR: How come that you were co-chief?

KB: That was my only Chikyu expedition, so…that was really fun. The expedition, well, Sean [Toczko] was EPM [Expedition Program Manager], the expedition had one goal, that was to install this riserless observatory in site C6. I remember when we had the first meeting on Chikyu, when Tomo, Saruhashi-san, said “we might finish early”. And things went really well, and in the end we did finish early. But to me it was bold, because it’s kind of tempting fate [laughs]. He said we might finish early, something’s going to  go wrong. And it went really well except for the final step, which seemed not to be happening. This was actually when we had everything in place – to release the tool that you ran in [the LTBMS]. And that wasn’t happening. And in the end it took something like two days to get that tube released, and they were at the point where they were choppering out the Schlumberger explosive expert, so we could blow off the the drill string – the bottom of the string – to get off, knowing that would not really be good for the observatory installation. But I forgot what the timing of the release was exactly.

Sean Toczko [ST]: Helicopter port. The helicopter was on its way, when we found a release…

KB: So that was a huge relief. But otherwise it was very interesting to be in the Chikyu, joining the Chikyu crew. One of them turned out to be was living in Miami; the assistant driller, Jason from New Zealand, yes. So we gathered together afterwards in Miami. It was a very pleasant experience. It was also fun to work with a generation of younger scientists at the core-log- seismic integration workshop. So everything went great. The only drawback (it’s not really a drawback), we had scheduled the TAT meeting right after the [planned] end of the expedition, but when the expedition ended almost two weeks earlier, I got to go home and then had another trip back to Japan two weeks later [laughs]. But I enjoy coming to Japan. So it made it complicated to get the travel reimbursement…two sources for one trip [laughs].

BMR: We mentioned at the beginning that you have been onboard the three drill ships. So I would like to know what are your thoughts on the evolution of sod from the perspective of someone who goes onboard and does science.

KB: Well, start with the early one, the Glomar Challenger. Enough berth space for only twelve, maybe thirteen scientists. Get somebody in the upper bunk of the radio man, if you were thirteen. The labs were kind of basic, three-stories high, with lots of equipment crammed in because space wasn’t that good. It was much more informal, for example, I have a picture, techs would go on the catwalk in certain expeditions, in warm weather, they’d be either in their flip flops getting the cores, things like that [laughs] working with instruments… Food was really good on the Challenger, and would be not so good on the JOIDES Resolution [laughs]. And then, the Challenger was quite capable of riserless drilling. They had developed the hydraulic piston core, about midway of DSDP, and…that revolutionized paleoceanography. So that was happening in DSDP with the Glomar Challenger. It could have gone on for many more years. It had been purpose built for scientific ocean drilling, on the supervision of Scripps, back in the late-sixties. So it could have gone for another fifteen, another ten or fifteen years. But the decision was made at higher levels to end DSDP and then start the new program at Texas A&M, the ODP, and they converted the JOIDES Resolution, the SEDCO/BP 471, that had been built for industry drilling a few years before… And that was… A better lab stack, accommodations for many more scientists which was helpful, although during DSDP I never noticed scientists being overworked, because there were fewer… ODP gave the opportunity to more scientists. JOIDES Resolution was also quite capable at riserless drilling, maybe a bit more capable at deep drilling than the Challenger had been. They improved the hydraulic piston core. Food was not so good, especially at the beginning [laughs]. Too salty for me. And then, they rebuilt the lab stack and accommodations in 2005-2007, or something like that, and it was even better, the lab stack and accommodations. I remember being in four-man rooms on the original ODP version of the JOIDES Resolution. It can get uncomfortable when two four-man rooms share a single bathroom… And of course ODP was really good, important at developing the borehole observatory concept. And then Chikyu, the experience was great. As I said, the labs were quite capable, although I’ve never got to see that, because we didn’t do coring during my expedition. But the complicated monitoring, borehole monitoring system that was assembled, that was quite impressive. And then the moon pool is amazing on Chikyu. And improvements that were made before that expeditions to simplify [deployment] – so a lot of good engineering support. The food was also good, so… [laughs]

BMR: That’s important. [laughs]

KB: That’s important, yes.

BMR: How does it feel to have been in scientific ocean drilling through all your career?

KB: [laughs] Only good things to think about. On top of everything, the experience and everything [I’ve mentioned so far], that’s how I met my wife on leg 109; then we sailed together on 111. She was on the original crew of technicians on the JOIDES Resolution. She did 9 legs until she quit after leg 115. So we met in 109, then 111, that’s it [laughs]. So there’s…of course, there are a lot of shipboard romances that ended up in marriages, on the JOIDES Resolution. I don’t know about Chikyu. Many of them have lasted, some haven’t, but… 

BMR: What are your thoughts on the evolution of the community and the science that can be done with scientific ocean drilling?

KB: I mean, it’s been great, the community expanded as well as the scope of their ideas. Through…from DSDP, to ODP, to IODP. I am concerned now, because when we thought about this, this is something so important for the careers of so many young scientists, including myself. My concern is, no matter what NSF can do, if they don’t have a riserless drillship for the next fifteen or twenty years after 2024, I don’t see the next generation getting that same kind of experience. We’re really trying to devise ways, but I just don’t see it happening to the extent that it did. So my concern is for the younger generation.

BMR: And how do you see the future of the field, in this sense?

KB: Well, I mean, there’s some optimism, that for example the Japan-Europe partnership is going to bring some opportunities. I don’t know how the negotiations are going about it, but hopefully NSF will support some US participation. Just I don’t know, I mean, NSF has pledged to try to support continued US participation. They are trying to preserve the budget they have been devoting to JOIDES Resolution operation costs, to support future US participating in the future program. That could be, to support US scientists to participate in the Japan and Europe program, and NSF could be supporting US scientists to analyze cores, and logs, and so forth in the future, or even one of drilling programs, like MSPs and… Those are expensive, actually. I hope that NSF actually can preserve that budget in ocean sciences. As I said, it’s a large enough item in the Congressional budget, that it could be taken out in the Congress or some of the funds can be reapportion within NSF by the high-level NSF management. There’s no guarantee that all will remain in ocean sciences for the support of the future US participation in scientific ocean drilling. I hope they can. That’s a tough issue.

BMR: With this, my questions are finished. I was wondering if there’s something else that you want to add or explain that we have not covered.

KB: I can’t really think of anything. I had the same thought when you sent the list of topics to cover. and I could think of anything that I could add.

BMR: Well, so thank you very much, thank you for your time and for explaining.

KB: It’s my pleasure.