Mike Coffin

marine geophysics, program management, program organization, international cooperation, Pacific Ocean, JOIDES Resolution

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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.

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Interview of Mike (Millard Filmore) Coffin by Beatriz Martinez-Rius on 2023 December 15, Moscone Center, San Francisco, USA [link]

Beatriz Martinez-Rius (BMR): Today  December 15 of 2023. I am Beartiz Martinez-Rius, postdoctoral Researcher at JAMSTEC, and I am at the Moscone Center in San Francisco with Mike Coffin. Thank you very much.

Mike Coffin (MC): You’re most welcome.

BMR: Can you please, first of all, introduce yourself, your affiliation and your current role?

MC: My name is Mike Coffin. I’m a professor at the University of Tasmania, an emeritus professor now. I’m also a research professor at the University of Maine in the state of Maine in the United States. And I’m also an adjunct scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution [note: in the state of Massachusetts in the United States]. My background is marine geophysics, and I study large scale volcanism and earthquakes in the oceans.

BMR: First of all, I would like to ask you where did you grow up? How was your childhood?

MC: I grew up in the state of Maine, which is a very rural state. It’s the far northeastern corner of the United States. It’s almost surrounded by Canada. It’s only bordered by one other state, but it’s bordered by two Canadian provinces. So it’s a relatively cold climate for the United States. I grew up with four seasons, which direct one’s activities when one is young. So sports, for example, in four different seasons will vary a lot. So [I] never had a chance to get bored with something because another season is coming to do something different.

BMR: Why you grow up interested in marine geophysics? What led you to chose that career?

MC: My interest in marine geophysics did not come until quite late in my youth. I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I went to university. I’d studied in high school basically everything you could study. A wide diversity of subjects. But then when I started university [note: in 1974], in my first year I had a course, an introductory course in [Earth] science, and that kind of set my path in that direction. But I also had other aspirations. So my second year of university [note: 1975-1976] I lived in Germany and Switzerland, and I studied basically German full time, although I audited some courses [note: at the ETH] in Zürich that had to do with Earth science. And then when I got back to my university in the United States [note: in 1976], I had to make a decision as to what I would major in. At that point I thought long and hard. And I said, “well, I like science and I like history.” And basically Earth science for me is the study of the history of the planet. So that set me on track, and I was very fortunate. [At the start of] my third year of university [note: in 1976, I did a field program]. My university runs [its own] field program; [these are] common [note: for Earth sciences students] in the United States. You go into the field and get field experience. So we did some geologic mapping in the Catskill Mountains in the eastern United States, and then we flew out to Utah and we drove to Salt Lake City, and we drove down the front range of the Wasatch Mountains [note: and continued to Arches National Park]. Then, we went to Lake Powell, which is a big reservoir behind the Glen Canyon Dam. We got on houseboats on Lake Powell [note: for several days], and we did very basic marine geology or, really on a lake it’s called lacustrine geology. We did primitive echo sounding. We measured the turbidity of the water. And then we drove to the Grand Canyon [note: stopping at Monument Valley and Meteor Crater], and we walked down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon [note: one day, staying at] Phantom Ranch overnight, and then we walked back [note: up the next day]. And of course you get the full history of the last billion years of Earth by walking down to the bottom and walking back up. So that gave me a history aspect to the planet. And then we drove back up through national parks, Zion and Bryce [Canyon] National Parks, and saw the wonderful geological exposures there in the desert, which I’d never seen before. Then we got on a plane, after seeing the Great Salt Lake, and went to Miami, and we flew down to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. We were doing volcanology, so we were studying active volcanoes in those three countries. My job during that time was to carry a gravity meter up the slopes of volcanoes, take gravity measurements along the way, and then walk back down these volcanoes. That stimulated my interest in volcanoes, and I’ve been studying volcanoes ever since. [For the rest of] my third year and my fourth year, I basically did all science. Earth science, physics, chemistry, [and math] courses. I was very fortunate because my undergraduate [note: and senior honors thesis] advisor [note: was a marine geophysicist, Charles Drake, who was a superb mentor]. Between my third and fourth years of university [note: July-December 1977], I had the opportunity to take six months off from university because my university ran on a term system, four terms a year. So I’d attended a summer [note: term between my second and third years in 1976], and could take six months off [note: the following year]. I wrote to many different oceanographic institutions volunteering to go to sea on research ships, and fortunately the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution offered me, even as an undergraduate, a space on a ship for five months. So I spent a month working on shore, preparing for the cruises, in Woods Hole, and then I spent five months [at sea]. I would not recommend that to anyone, spending five months straight on a ship. But I did it and I loved it. We did all different kinds of marine geophysics and marine geology on those voyages. Then I applied to graduate school and I was fortunate enough to get into Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. I did my PhD there. And [I’ve been] doing the same thing ever since, marine geophysics.

BMR: From your years at Lamont [Doherty Earth Observatory], do you remember any mentor, professor, or researcher that influenced in your career?

MC: I arrived in Lamont in 1978 as a graduate student and I shopped around different research projects. Everyone at Lamont is on a scholarship. Some of those scholarships are just paid by general university funds, some of them are paid out of research grants and contracts. I entered on a general scholarship because I didn’t know what I wanted to do, really, and so I shopped around. The first project I worked on was disposal of high-level nuclear waste in the ocean [note: deep beneath the seafloor], which was a popular idea in the 1970s and early 1980s. But has since been discarded as not a very good idea. Why pollute the ocean with radioactive material or even have that possibility? So I did that for a while and I went on a couple of voyages to investigate places in the ocean, including in the Western Pacific. And that was my first visit to Japan. I flew through Japan in 1980 to join a research vessel in Guam, and then we went out from Guam to the Shatsky Rise, came back to Guam and I flew back to United States. So that was my introduction to the Pacific [note: including Japan]. And after that, I found a research project that I really wanted to do, and that was with my PhD supervisor, Philip Rabinowitz, who became the first director of the Ocean Drilling Program. But at that time he managed the Site Survey Data Bank at Lamont-Doherty for the Deep Sea Drilling Project [DSDP]. So I became familiar with deep sea drilling just because I was in the same office with, say, Carl Brenner and Phil Rabinowitz. We were all together in the same office, the same workspace. My thesis was working in the Western Somali Basin between Madagascar and East Africa, and it was basically to study the breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana, and when Madagascar actually separated from East Africa and created the Western Somali Basin; and also to study the development of parts of continental margins around East Africa and Madagascar. I did that for my PhD. And then I embarked on my global tour of academic positions. [note: other key mentors at Lamont-Doherty included the late Dennis Hayes, James Hays, Lynn Sykes, the late Marcus Langseth, William Ryan, the late Wallace Broecker, Ian Dalziel, Roger Anderson, Brian Tucholke, the late John Nafe, and Arnold Gordon.]

BMR: Where did you end up going after finishing at Columbia University?

MC: My PhD supervisor had developed a working relationship and friendship with an Australian scientist in the 1970s [note: while still a PhD student, the Australian scientist had spent nine months at Lamont-Doherty in 1968/1969]. The proposal that was written to the National Science Foundation to do the work offshore East Africa had the Australian as a co-investigator, even though he was based in Australia. So I spent a month at sea for my PhD voyages with my PhD supervisor, Rabinowitz, and then I spent a month at sea with the Australian co-investigator, [note: the late] David Falvey [note: then at the University of Sydney], who was also an important player in scientific ocean drilling. He eventually became director of [note: Ocean Drilling Programs at] Joint Oceanographic Institutions in Washington D.C., many years later. So it was a tight community of people who knew about scientific ocean drilling, and even though none of my work involved scientific ocean drilling, I was well aware of it thanks to the people with whom I was working. So, back to your original question, the reason I started my global tour of positions was thanks to David Falvey, [note: who led successful efforts for Australia to] acquire a seismic research vessel on charter from Norway to start up a huge exploration program of Australian continental margins. And so he (David Falvey) contacted me and said, “do you want to come to Australia and help start up this big continental margins program?” And he said, “I know you’ve spent a lot of time at sea, even though you just finished your PhD, you’ve spent many, many months, probably over a year at that point, of time on research ships. So why don’t you come down and help us start this program?” I had other opportunities in the United States and in Canada, but Australia was certainly more intriguing and more adventurous than the other opportunities. So I moved to Australia [note: in February 1985]. I worked for their geological survey, which at the time was called the Bureau of Mineral Resources, Geology & Geophysics. It’s now known as Geoscience Australia; it’s been through some name changes. I stayed there for five years before I decided I really wanted to be at a university. I started applying for jobs after three or four years in Australia. And the best opportunity that came up was at the University of Texas at Austin, the Institute for Geophysics. So I moved to Texas [note: in 1990] and I stayed there for the next eleven years. The main reason I moved to Texas was because when I was an undergraduate, I’d sailed on one of those five research voyages with a scientist from Woods Hole. He was a graduate student at the time, and then he became a scientist at the University of Texas. His name is Jamie Austin (James A. Austin Jr.), also a very important name in scientific ocean drilling. And he essentially recruited me to come to the University of Texas and I stayed there quite a while.

BMR: What was your first engagement in scientific ocean [drilling]?

MC: My first formal involvement was attending the COSOD II (Conference on Scientific Ocean Drilling II) conference in Strasbourg, France, in 1987. As a graduate student, when I was finishing my graduate work in 1983, ‘84, ‘85, I’d written a couple of proposals for scientific ocean drilling. We knew that the Ocean Drilling Program was coming online in late-1984/early 1985, and I was really curious to learn more about the East African margin and the Western Somali Basin. So I wrote a proposal to drill there. That was my first submission for an ocean drilling [expedition]. But my first formal involvement was the COSOD II conference, and then the following year [1988] I sailed on ODP Leg 120 to the Kerguelen Plateau in the southern Indian Ocean. Australia was not a member at that time, but because we were working in Australia’s Exclusive Economic Zone, they [ODP] invited two Australian observers on the drillship [note: JOIDES Resolution]. I sailed as a physical properties specialist, but also as an Australian observer with another Australian colleague [note: the late Patrick Quilty, Australian Antarctic Division].

BMR: By that time you already had experience in oceanographic vessels, right? So what were your thoughts when you were on the JOIDES Resolution with such an international team of researchers? What were the differences with other cruises?

MC: That experience made me a huge fan of scientific ocean drilling. All my previous voyages, basically, involved a handful of scientists very narrowly focused on a particular scientific outcome using a specific technique, or maybe four or five techniques maximum. On the drillship you’ve got [approximately] thirty PhD level scientists, PhD students; you’ve got a spectrum of specialties across many major parts [note: specialties] of Earth science. I found that atmosphere on board to be incredibly stimulating. The age range – I was one of the youngest scientists on board, and they ranged to people decades, many decades older than I was. [Their] experience filtered down to the younger people like myself. And it was such a stimulating and educational environment for me that I said, “I’m going to do this again. I want to continue my involvement in scientific ocean drilling.”

BMR: What was your new role at the University of Texas? Was it related to the program?

MC: No, not really. Even though I was writing proposals for scientific ocean drilling, my research is mainly geophysical. So I was doing [mainly] seismic reflection voyages. When I was in Australia, I began studying large igneous provinces, big volcanic eruptions on the seafloor that create oceanic plateaus, for example. And then, through the early nineties, I became more convinced that we needed to drill the Kerguelen Plateau again. We’d drilled it in 1988, but that raised a lot more questions, really interesting questions. So I got involved with a group that was writing proposals to do that – an international group, as most ODP proposals were written by international groups. And the proposal was supported. So we went back to the Kerguelen Plateau at the end of 1998, into early 1999, and did a lot more drilling and learned a lot more about the plateau [note: and its conjugate, Broken Ridge].

BMR: Were you co-chief scientist of that expedition?

MC: Yes. The late Fred Frey (Frederick A. Frey) from MIT and I were the co-chief scientists.

BMR: What was the most challenging of being co-chief? What is the role of a co-chief?

MC: That’s a very good question. I think keeping everyone motivated. Sometimes, after four, six weeks at sea, people kind of get into a slump – maybe even earlier – when the fresh food runs out, and morale tends to go down when the quality of the food goes down. So keeping people happy and productive is probably the biggest challenge. But also all the writing. I was very fortunate that Fred Frey, my co-chief scientist, was an accomplished writer. We were both very interested in English writing and English grammar, so we could share the workload from all the scientists. We had to review everything that every scientist wrote. We had a very good [note: staff scientist, Paul Wallace, currently at the University of Oregon] – they were called staff scientists, project managers from Texas A&M, who actually coordinated all the logistics — and he was an excellent writer as well. So our writing jobs were simplified because we had three people who were really interested in using English as a language to convey our scientific results. Otherwise, one of my salient memories from that trip — a Christmas/New Year’s cruise — was I got to play Santa Claus (laughs) at the Christmas celebration. So they had a Santa Claus costume for me and I got to give out gifts. We had a New Year’s Eve party down in the photo lab deep in the bowels of the JOIDES Resolution. And I remember a Danish scientist [note: Mai Borre] came up to me. We were dancing to the music of the time in this lab. She came up to me and said, “Mike, this is the best New Year’s Eve party I’ve ever been to!” (laughs)

BMR: I would like to ask you about the period just afterwards, when you moved to the University of Tokyo after Texas. What motivated that change?

MC: It was a trajectory through the 1990. In the early 1990s I started collaborating with Japanese scientists on geophysical work, including with Kiyoshi Suyehiro and Asahiko Taira. We had a joint program in the Solomon Islands [region] doing seismic research in 1994. We had joint cruise the Ontong Java Plateau in 1998, and I think the Japanese scientists got to know me through that time at sea together [note: as well as ashore]. We knew that IODP was coming along. And Japan had committed to build Chikyu and committed to co-lead the next phase of scientific ocean drilling. So I remember it very well in late 1999, at the turn of the millennium, close to New Year’s Eve, I got a message from Asahiko Taira. He said, “Mike, we’d like you to come to Japan and help us start up IODP.” And some context to that was, I’d been appointed, by experienced scientific ocean drilling people much older than me, to lead the writing group for the Initial Science Plan for the IODP [note: Earth, Oceans, and Life – Scientific Investigation of the Earth System Using Multiple Drilling Platforms and New Technologies – Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Initial Science Plan, 2003-2013]. So between 1999 and 2001, the late Judith McKenzie [note: of ETH-Zürich] and I led a small group that was writing the [Initial] Science Plan. We had three major workshops to develop the science plan. We had CONCORD (Conference on Cooperative Ocean Riser Drilling) in Japan [note: in 1997], we had COMPLEX (Conference on Multiple Platform Exploration of the Ocean) in Vancouver [note: in 1999], and we had APLACON (Alternate Platform Conference) in Lisbon [note: in 2001]. Those three community-wide workshops fit into the plan we developed in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Asahiko Taira and Kiyoshi Suyehiro (on the writing group as well) probably sized me up and thought, “well, maybe he’s someone who can fit in Japan academia.” At the same time I had job offers in [note: Sydney,] Australia and in Washington D.C., and I was weighing those different job offers. Japan was by far the most exciting and the most interesting to me. So I decided I’d [note: accept the offer to] become a professor at the University of Tokyo. It was a pretty brave move by the University of Tokyo because the Ocean Research Institute, which is now the Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, had never hired a non-Japanese professor before. So it was very brave of them to decide to offer me the position. And I hope they were happy with that decision, in retrospect.

BMR: Before continuing with Japan, I’m interested in the Science Plan during the transition between ODP and IODP. As I understood, there’s a period when many more sciences, perspectives, and technological capabilities were joining. So I would like you to tell me a bit more about what were the challenges, the opportunities, how did you communicate with all these communities trying harmonize all these interests into a common program? MC: As I said, the three huge workshops involving hundreds of people in 1997, 1999, and 2001 were really critical for getting community input and support for writing the Initial Science Plan. And after we went through many drafts of the Science Plan. It was reviewed by many different groups and eventually went to the National Science Board in the US and went to the then ministries in Japan. I don’t know how many different European countries had to sign off on it, so it had extensive review. What was really exciting at the time and still is exciting to my mind are, of course, the riser capabilities that Chikyu offered, and the very shallow water and high latitude drilling offered by the Europeans. Those were capabilities that never existed in DSDP or ODP, and riser drilling brought us to areas that we could never drill before. Similarly the mission specific platforms. So that was really exciting, to have those new technologies and platforms come online, and be able to provide those to the scientific community. Then, on the science side, we developed the Science Plan around three themes:  basically solid Earth, climate studies and paleoceanography…but the new thing was the deep biosphere. People had been studying what was living beneath the seafloor, but not in a really rigorous way. It [note: previous research] was more haphazard [note: serendipitous]. And so we decided to make a major theme of the Initial Science Plan this deep biosphere. And that, of course, has really taken off with respect to scientific ocean drilling in general.

[Interruption, compelled to change location]

MC: We finished the Initial Science Plan before I moved to Tokyo. So it was just about the time that I moved to Tokyo [note: September 2001, shortly after 9/11] that the Initial Science Plan was published and made public.

BMR: I would like to go a bit back in time, to the moment when Chikyu was planned and was announced. From your perspective, in the position you were occupying, how was the environment? How did you see the future with Chikyu?

MC: I think because scientific ocean drilling really started in 1968 with the Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) and getting into the nineties, it was approaching its 30th birthday…I think there was a feeling in the United States, certainly among some other scientific disciplines in the geosciences, that maybe we’d had enough of scientific ocean drilling. And…since I’d been working in the United States since 1990, I felt this mood or this attitude that, “well, maybe we should start doing other things other than scientific ocean drilling.” But then when Japan said, “we want to build a riser drill ship and we want to co-lead international scientific ocean drilling,” I think that reinvigorated the US community. Maybe some competitive juices were flowing as well and said that, “well, if Japan’s going to invest that much in scientific ocean drilling, we should match that investment and continue this program.” And I think the deep ocean biosphere was part of the argument or rationale. Here’s an exciting new frontier of science that we know practically nothing about. So the combination of Chikyu and a new scientific theme for scientific ocean drilling, I think really pushed the United States to say, “yes, we’ll co-lead the next phase of international drilling.”

BMR: What about the goal of drilling to the mantle? You were involved in the lithosphere drilling panel, right?

MC: Yes. Of course, that’s how scientific ocean drilling started, with Project Mohole. It’s always been a goal and various approaches have been used, (for example) places where the Earth’s mantle is much closer to the surface than in normal oceanic crust. So, yes, it’s been an ongoing theme through the entire history of scientific ocean drilling. I wouldn’t say that that was a prime motivator for the start of IODP or for getting IODP up and going, but it’s always been there as a as a fundamental goal of international scientific ocean drilling.

BMR: Can you explain me something about your experience at the University of Tokyo as being the first hired non-Japanese professor?

MC: It was an interesting scenario, because Asahiko Taira recruited me to join him at the University of Tokyo [note: at the Ocean Research Institute, currently the Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute]. But in the time between the University of Tokyo offering me the job and the time I actually arrived – there were some visa issues, as there always are in international moves – he had decided to move to JAMSTEC. And (previously) Kiyoshi Suyehiro had also moved from the University of Tokyo to JAMSTEC. So the two people I knew the best had left the university. So in our group [note: Department of Ocean Floor Geoscience], which constituted marine geosciences at the University of Tokyo, we were basically three professors [note: along with associate professors, assistant professors, and graduate students]. One of the professors, Kensaku Tamaki – he has also passed away – he really took me under his wing and helped introduce me to the way the university works, and what my role was in teaching, research, how to get students, etc. So as you probably know, being someone who lives in Japan as a foreigner, you are welcomed to be part of a group. And that group basically defines your circle of people you socialize with and whom you use as a professional network as well. So I felt very welcomed by Kensaku Tamaki into the University of Tokyo group and that really helped me, especially with scientific ocean drilling, because as I’ll describe later, we became very intimately linked through IODP in terms of the scientific management [advisory] structure.

BMR: So let’s talk about the scientific management of the program, if you want to.

MC: It was decided…in the scientific management [advisory] structure, there was a pre-IODP [note: structure, iSAS, or interim Science Advisory Structure], essentially an interim parallel structure to [note: the scientific management [advisory] structure of] ODP, and it was aimed at organizing the scientific community’s management of scientific ocean drilling for IODP, and Nobu Eguchi and Jeff Schuffert were key people in that transitional office [note: iSAS Office, at JAMSTEC Yokosuka; after IODP commenced in 2003, the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Management International (IODP-MI) Office, at Hokkaido University in Sapporo] to get IODP up and going. So it was decided early on that there’d be an executive committee [note: SPPOC, or Science Planning and Policy Oversight Committee] that would be senior level people who would oversee the whole program itself. And there would be a Science Planning Committee [note: SPC, also relatively senior people] which would actually deal with all the proposals after they’d been reviewed, make drilling schedules, and run the scientific side of the program. It was decided by the interim Planning Committee [iPC] that the chair of the executive committee [SPPOC] and the chair of the Science Planning Committee [SPC] would [note: alternate] between [two] different countries [note: Japan and USA]. One [note: two-year term] would be US and one would be Japanese, and that would continue through the first ten years of IODP. How that was determined to start with was by a coin toss. Would Japan have the executive committee [SPPOC] role and Science Planning Committee [SPC] role first, or would the US? Japan won the coin toss [note: for the first two years of IODP, 2003-2005]. So Kensaku Tamaki became Chair of the executive committee [SPPOC] and I became chair of the Science Planning Committee [SPC]. So for the first two years of IODP it was the two of us, who were working very closely together [note: along with Nobu Eguchi and Jeff Schuffert], to get the program going – even though both committees had broad international representation. We were the leaders of those two committees, so it was up to us to get everything going and organized.

One of the biggest challenges for me was communication. Japan had never before led a major [note: international] marine geoscientific international endeavor, and Japanese customs and personalities meant that usually the Japanese contingent on a committee would want to reach consensus on a decision before they publicly conveyed that to the committee, and also the Japanese culturally are quite reticent. They tend not to – especially when there’s any confrontation or controversy involved — and don’t like to get engaged in that. So I had to figure out a way to engage the Japanese scientists in co-leading the program. And how I approached that was to run the meetings using something called Robert’s Rules, where I would essentially [note: ensure that] people would have to raise their hands [note: to have the floor]. In [exclusively] western meetings, people just butt in from all different directions. And hence meetings can be chaotic. So I tried to instill a more rigorous order to the meetings so that every person had a chance to have a voice. And if people didn’t speak up, if they didn’t want to speak, I would actually approach them proactively and say, “is there anything you’d like to contribute to the discussion?.” I think that cultural shift was very important for Japan’s co-leading the program, because I think the more Japanese scientists became aware of how western committees work, the more comfortable they were speaking up at meetings. And so it was basically invitational gestures at the start of the program to bring them into co-leading the program on terms that they weren’t necessarily used to working within the Japanese community.

BMR: What was the most valuable learning you took from that role of chair?

MC: I think it was becoming much more culturally sensitive to all nationalities that were serving [note: in the SAS, Science Advisory Structure]. Japan, as co-leader of the program, was probably the biggest challenge. But every country has different modes of communication, and also because the fundamental working language of scientific ocean drilling is English, there are huge language barriers. Some people have natural, or worked very hard to have, capabilities in languages that aren’t their native language. Other people are perpetually not able to communicate very well in a foreign language. Trying to bring all those people in from the twenty-five or so different nations who are involved in IODP was a big learning experience for me. How to engage everyone and get everyone’s contribution to the program.

BMR: Talking about the very early years of IODP and the planning of what it would be. Now, with the perspective of the program having reached an end, is there something you would have planned or done differently?

MC: That’s a very good question. We were challenged early on in IODP because Chikyu wasn’t yet available. It wasn’t launched until several years after IODP started and did not become operational [note: until 2007]. The way IODP was configured, originally, was with the central management organization. It was called IODP Management International (IODP-MI). That was eliminated after the first ten years of IODP as being too expensive and not being that effective. I think, in retrospect, from the very start of IODP we should have…one, not necessarily had a central management organization, and two, actually insist the countries or consortia pay their fair share of participating in the program. That’s been a bone of contention ever since the international phase of DSDP started – the so-called IPOD (note: from 1975 to 1983). How much countries would contribute to be part of international scientific ocean drilling. And some countries and consortia have benefited hugely, but not really paid their fair share of the costs of running the program. And I think we’re seeing, especially, that playing out now in a huge way as IODP comes to an end, the second phase comes to an end, and we’re trying to understand what might happen in the future among various parties who have long been involved in scientific ocean drilling. I mean, there seems to be a widening rift between various parties and scientific ocean drilling that should have been addressed a long time ago.

BMR: What was your role in those ten first years?

MC: The first two years I was chair of the Science Planning Committee. And those positions rotate every two years. So the next two years it was a US scientist who was chair of the Executive Committee (SPPOC) and a US person who chaired of the Science Planning Committee (SPC). I don’t remember who the chair of the Executive committee was [note: Nicklas Pisias, Oregon State University], but my successor on the Science Planning Committee was Keir Becker [note: University of Miami], a well-known US scientist, long involved in drilling, and then it would rotate back [note: to Japan]. So over the first ten years of IODP, these leadership roles flipped countries every two years. After that [note: the first rotation], the National Science Foundation in the United States and MEXT in Japan (the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) decided that they should have a review of the first three years of IODP, and they asked me to chair the review committee [note: IODP First Triennium Review Committee) and select members for the review committee that weren’t nominated by the various countries. So from 2006 to 2007 I chaired a review of the first three years, and that review included the management organization as well as the program itself. The recommendations that came out of that review were basically to streamline the structure, the scientific management structure of ODP. To essentially reduce the number of panels and committees to a more reasonable number and make the program more economically efficient, or more financially efficient.

BMR: I’m wondering why the review committee was a committee of scientists involved in the program and not an external committee.

MC: They wanted the chair of the committee to be knowledgeable about scientific ocean drilling, but members of the committee were not necessarily associated with scientific ocean drilling, so there were a few that were, but others weren’t. So it was a hybrid of IODP-familiar people and IODP-independent people on the committee.

BMR: Have you found in those years any misunderstandings or difficulties in articulating the interest of scientists and the science they want to see done, and the perspective of funding agencies?

MC: The short answer to that question is no. The funding agencies [give] very little, practically no feedback on the science plans we developed. Aside from a budgetary perspective – there are expensive drilling expeditions and there are relatively economical drilling expeditions. And we had to fit our science program of expeditions into the budgetary framework. So some years we would know that that expedition is just too expensive. We can’t possibly do that within our budgetary guidelines. But for the most part, other than budget reasons, I can’t think of any instance where the funding agencies actually said, “no, you can’t do that,” or “you must do this.” They were very hands off for the first ten years of IODP. I’ve been involved representing different countries other than Japan and the US since I moved to the UK in 2008, and I haven’t seen strong evidence for the funding agencies telling the scientists what to do and what not to do. And of course, the Chikyu, not being able to operate full-time has been a huge blow; the Mission Specific Platforms not being able to live up to their original commitment of one expedition a year…that’s been pretty significant over the last 10 [note: 20] years. But, the JOIDES Resolution has really been the centerpiece. It’s basically been operating full time throughout the first twenty years of IODP [note: with exception of a major ship modernization in 2007-2008]. And so that’s really been the stalwart – the driving platform for the whole program.

BMR: Connecting to my previous questions, now we have some perspective on those first ten years. What do you think that went wrong, so to speak? Which were the elements that you could not plan that that moment that made the program go different – not wrong, necessarily?

MC: I think external factors – at least the US, it’s what I’m most familiar with. Back in 2001, late-1990s and early-2000s, there was a declaration by the American President saying, “we’re going to double the National Science Foundation’s budget.” There was huge optimism in the United States that this would happen and we were even talking about titanium drill pipe for the ship (JOIDES Resolution) – it’s much lighter, much stronger than steel…more capable drilling platforms. Then, 9/11 happened and all of a sudden the US budget was basically a wartime budget and NSF did not get their doubling of the budget. So ambitions were greatly scaled back, and Japan’s economy did not recover, basically ever, from early-1990s slowdown. Japan’s population started to decline and JAMSTEC’s budget started being reduced every year. So Chikyu could not be run twelve months a year or even anything close to twelve months a year. So all of our optimism of the late-1990 and early-2000 was kind of skewered or affected by these forces beyond our control, way beyond the control of any scientists involved in scientific ocean drilling. And it basically boiled down to money issues. ECORD was never able to fulfill its commitment of one expedition a year. So the three major parties, Japan and the US co-leading the program, and Europe being the strong second place participant in leading the program, all of our budgets, all of those three entities’ budgets, suffered through the 2000s and the 2010s; and our ambitions, optimistic as they were twenty-five years ago, were just not being realized.

BMR: How came that you shifted from Japan to the UK? That’s a big shift.

MC: (laughs) So again, it was a scientific ocean drilling connection that I learned about an opportunity because I’d been involved in management of IODP reviews when I was in Japan, and for personal reasons, I started looking at positions elsewhere if opportunities arose. I would have stayed in Japan if it weren’t for personal issues, but this opportunity arose in the UK to become [inaugural] Director of Research at the National Oceanography Center [note: and also a Professor at the University of Southampton], which is the equivalent of JAMSTEC in Japan, the equivalent of the major U.S. oceanographic institutions. They created a new position called Director of Research. My job was to bring together 200 researchers from a government lab and a university lab and to mesh [note: their] scientific endeavors. And that opportunity appealed to me. So, with considerable reluctance, but also the prospect of something new and different and exciting, I moved to the UK in 2008. Unfortunately, after basically a year there… I mean, the scientists themselves were great and the person who actually informed me of this opportunity was Damon Teagle, who’s a leading proponent for scientific ocean drilling [note: we sailed on ODP Leg 183 served in the IODP SAS together]. He told me about the opportunity and really encouraged me and promoted me to the UK. After a year there, the government decided that no, the government lab and the university lab weren’t going to be combined. They were going to be kept separate. So that left me in an unusual situation, the job I was hired for really didn’t exist anymore. So about that time, a representative [note: Peter Frappell, Dean of Graduate Research] from the University of Tasmania in Australia was touring various oceanographic institutions in Europe and he came to talk to me and he said, “we want to start a new institute in Australia based on the National Oceanography Center. We have a government lab, and we have a university lab. We want to combine them into a new institute that had no prior history.” And so I said, “well, that sounds interesting, especially in the context of what’s happened here in the UK since I’ve been arrived.” So I flew to Tasmania, I talked to people there, and they offered me the job without interviewing anyone else. So I said this looks like the culmination of my career, to start a new institute from scratch and build it into something that has worldwide significance. That’s been a very rewarding experience in Australia for me.

BMR: What have been your goals in mind when building this institute, especially regarding the international cooperation?

MC: The goals were basically to create a world leading marine science institute [note: encapsulated as “building IMAS (Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies), driving change, and developing people”]. We had excellent scientists on the government side, which is mainly fisheries and aquaculture scientists. We had recruited and had excellent scientists in the four major branches of oceanography – geology, chemistry, biology and physics. We had excellent scientists in those realms, but to bring them all together required creating an institute, getting money from the Federal Government for building a new building. We got 45 million (Australian) dollars to build a [note: IMAS headquarters] building. And then I convinced the university we needed to hire some stars from overseas. So we hired some world-leading scientists. So, we were building the institute and within five years we were ranked in the top ten institutions in the world in oceanography. That, to me, was very gratifying. We were able to essentially start from non-existing, to becoming one of the top ten leading institutions in the world in the space of five years. And I think my management and leadership experience in IODP really contributed to that. What I learned from my time with IODP, which is continued right up until this time in various manners and shapes and forms, that really helped me in the other side of my [work] life, which is founding and leading a new laboratory [note: IMAS].

BMR: Can you give me any particular example of how you transferred these things you’ve learned in IODP to running the new institute?

MC: I think engaging everyone… Building out my new institute, we had to have a strategic plan, which is basically similar to the [note: decadal] IODP science plans. So what I learned from co-leading the development of the Initial Science Plan from IODP, I transferred to starting up the new institute and developing a strategic plan for that. Bringing people together over the course of multiple meetings, getting everyone’s ideas on the board, and then distilling that into something coherent and that is marketable to the university and to the government funders of the institute.So that was probably the most significant knowledge transfer [from scientific ocean] drilling to my institute.

BMR: How did you get engaged in ANZIC (Australia & New Zealand IODP Consortium)?

MC: I moved to Australia from the UK in January 2011, and almost as soon as I arrived I was contacted by scientific [note: ocean drilling] leadership [note: Neville Exon, an Australian scientific drilling stalwart at the Australian National University (ANU)] in Australia, who wanted Australia to become part of [note: actually stronger in] IODP, because at the time [note: when IODP commenced in 2003], Australia had toyed with participating in IODP, as it had been a participant in ODP. But then, when IODP started, it wasn’t part of it [note: Australia eventually joined IODP in 2008, largely due to the influence and efforts of David Falvey, who was then Executive Director for the physics, chemistry, and geoscience portfolio at the Australian Research Council (ARC) – which funded the Australian component of ANZIC – from 2006 to 2008]. People in Australia knew about my experience with IODP and they said, “we’d like you to help us strengthen ANZIC, and we’d like you to chair our Science Committee.” And I said, “I’m busy starting an institute [note: as part of building IMAS, I had IMAS become a member of IODP-MI in 2011; this membership continued through the latter’s ultimate dissolution in 2014]. I don’t really have a lot of time for scientific ocean drilling, but I’m happy to contribute my knowledge and expertise. And I will join the Science Committee, but I won’t chair the Science Committee.” So I joined the ANZIC Science Committee [note: in 2011; and chaired the Chikyu+10 International Workshop in Tokyo in 2013], and after my institute was set up, I eventually became chair of the ANZIC Science Committee [note: for 2018 and 2019, including chairing the ANZIC Ocean Planet Workshop in 2019 and representing ANZIC on the 2050 Science Framework Working Group in 2019 and 2020, and from 2014 to 2018 I served as ANZIC representative on the JOIDES Resolution Facility Board]. Then, very sadly, the person [note: Leanne Armand, Australian National University] who took over the ANZIC directorship in the late 2010s became quite ill [note: in early 2021] and she asked me to be acting in her role as director of ANZIC. And I said, I was honored and happy to do that for her. She had surgery, she took several months off, she came back to work for a couple of months, and she took over…she resumed the role. I relinquished the interim role and then after she came back for several months, she became [note: seriously] ill again and she asked me once again, “will you take this over this role over for me [again]?” and I said, “I’d be happy to.” So that was mid-2021. I did it for six months and then she passed away [note: in January 2022], and I did it for another six months and ANZIC hired a permanent director. So I was acting in that director role [note: and represented ANZIC on the JOIDES Resolution Facility Board once again, as well as served as ANZIC liaison to the European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling (ECORD) Facility Board and Chikyu Facility Board] for just over a year due to the director’s illness [note: and death].

BMR: What has been ANZIC’s position? How ANZIC has navigated the IODP programs?

MC: It’s been an interesting path for ANZIC. There was no clear funding mechanism for Australian participation in IODP, so there is [note: has been] a sort of jury-rigged or kind of ad hoc solution to get money for Australia to participate. [In] New Zealand there’s a more straightforward funding path, but in Australia we had to write proposals to the equivalent of the National Science Foundation in the United States. It’s called the Australian Research Council (ARC). We had to write proposals for an [initial] five year increment for funding for our participation in IODP. And sometimes we get five years of funding, sometimes we get three years of funding, sometimes we get two years of funding. But there was always this uncertainty. We didn’t know if we’d get funding because it was not part of the Australian system, more infrastructure-driven science than probably science-driven. But anyway, just as the ANZIC Director (was becoming ill) – who passed away – she started investigating alternative funding sources from the Australian Government and she made the initial contacts for different funding routes. And after she died, that continued to be pursued and proposals were written to a different funding stream and just this year [note: 2023] became successful. We got a long-term commitment from the Australian Government [note: through AuScope] to fund Australian participation in scientific ocean drilling. So that was very rewarding, to finally be outside of this one, two, three, five year (funding) cycle; to have more secure funding for Australian participation. And we hope that New Zealand is able to continue its financial contributions as well. In smaller countries, like Australia or New Zealand, it’s a big challenge because unless drilling is actually done in the [country’s] Exclusive Economic Zone or the extended continental shelf of (all) smaller countries, it’s hard to convince funding agencies or politicians that this is a highly worthwhile endeavor. So we try to convince them that that’s the international educational opportunities for younger scientists; early career scientists learn so much when they go on the drillship. We try to convince them that, yes, some drilling platform will eventually come into these waters and there’ll be a huge scientific as well as economic benefit to that. So yes, that is a big difference between, say, the US and Japan versus the smaller countries like Australia, New Zealand, [South] Korea, etc that are trying to get funding. [Note: A major ANZIC contribution to future scientific ocean drilling has been the report of the 2019 Ocean Planet workshop (Ocean Planet: An ANZIC workshop report focused on future research challenges and opportunities for collaborative international scientific ocean drilling) that I chaired. The report was ANZIC’s contribution to development of the 2050 Science Framework: Exploring Earth by Scientific Ocean Drilling.]

BMR: Regarding this, you have been in management roles in all these different countries and consortiums, so I would like to ask you about your perspective on that. What are the differences in the position of each of those communities?

MC: One big difference is that all [both ocean and continental] scientific drilling is united under an umbrella and Japan; it’s not in the United States. It’s heading towards that in Australia (and) New Zealand. And in Europe, some ECORD members do both, but some don’t. So each country and consortium handle [scientific] drilling differently. And then, of course, in the United States you don’t have language challenges. In Japan, you don’t have language challenges. But in Europe, you’ve got twenty or so countries that are trying to reach agreement, and each one has a funding agency that has to be sold on the program. I mean, managing ECORD is almost beyond belief in terms of the complexity of the funding arrangements and getting organized. They do it admirably well, but all sorts of pushes and pulls within ECORD involve scientific ocean drilling. Australia is a fairly small scientific drilling community and we’re pretty united. We have workshops and…New Zealand is much, much smaller. They probably have a couple of dozen scientists who are interested in drilling. So I think the smaller the community is, the easier it is to manage, and the language, if there’s a single language that makes it easier as well.

BMR: What are the challenges to communicate and to reach agreement between these communities – ECORD, Japan, and the US, and ANZIC?

MC: My roles have been mainly on the scientific, not on the funding or the executive side of scientific ocean drilling. So I only have sort of a far-field observation on that. But obviously tensions have been high for the last several years, particularly between the US and ECORD. And from the Australian perspective, it’s very far away. But because I’ve been involved with both ECORD and the US management of the program in the past, I have this perspective. It usually boils down to money. What countries are willing to (contribute). The big challenge in the US has been basically flat funding, no inflation adjustment, especially over the past few years with very high inflation. ECORD has never really been able to get (scientific ocean drilling) into their big EU (European Union) (funding) programs [e.g., Horizon Europe]. They’ve never been able to get a big chunk of money. I mean, with Europe’s population and with Europe’s GDP, they should be contributing a similar amount on a per capita basis as the US. So, 40, 50 million dollars a year, but they’ve never been able to do that. It’s always been half that or less. Money on both sides of the Atlantic with respect to the ECORD and the US have been huge challenges and that invariably leads to tensions in the program.

BMR: How do you see the future of scientific ocean drilling?

MC: I’m always an eternal optimist. I would like to see international scientific ocean drilling engaging every country that’s possibly interested in it continue. I think in the next few years we’re going to see a disintegration of effort. But I hope that that comes around full circle and we get back to the original aspirations that start with IPOD, the international phase of drilling with DSDP, and continued through ODP and in the first two phases of IODP.

BMR: Going towards the conclusion, how scientific ocean drilling has shaped or influenced in your career?

MC: As someone whose field is marine geophysics, there’s not a lot of opportunities in scientific ocean drilling to participate in expeditions. You can sail as a co-chief, as a logging scientist, as a seismic stratigraphic correlator, or as a physical property specialist. Other disciplines have much more opportunity to sail on the drillship. But my main scientific benefit from drilling has been to ground truth the geophysical data that I’m most interested in analyzing. So I participated in two drilling expeditions on the Kerguelen Plateau [note: legs 120 in 1988, and 183 in 1998/99, also to Broken Ridge], and one on the Ontong Java Plateau [note: Leg 192 in 2000]. Both those were preceded by major seismic reflection and refraction campaigns where we got remote sensing data and made interpretations based on very little data. And then the drillship comes along, drills a hole through the data that we’ve imaged, the remote sensing data, and actually tells us what the age of a horizon is, what the lithology is, what fossils are in it. So that ground truth is extremely important. I mean, oil companies have lost billions of dollars drilling on interpretations of geophysical data that turned out not to be correct. After they did drill, they found that interpretations were wrong. So it’s really important for marine geophysics to have that ground truth to tell us what’s real, and what the truth is.

BMR: How about the more personal level, what are the learnings of the international cooperation in scientific ocean drilling?

MC: On a personal level, the contacts and friends and colleagues I’ve made through scientific ocean drilling, I think, have resulted in the majority of my job moves across four continents. And as I said early on, the stimulation of being on the drillship and then being so close with people from different disciplines for two months at a time, that really fosters lifelong relationships with people. And you continue those friendships and collegial relationships long after the drilling expedition has ended. That’s been a highlight of my scientific career. The friends I have in Japan, colleagues and friends in the UK, those in Australia, those in the United States…I mean, you see it at this meeting (note: AGU23). We get together regularly; we see each other in various places around the world where we renew those ties and friendships, and we plan new endeavors together. It’s a very rewarding program. And I don’t know if that exists outside of scientific ocean drilling. I can’t think of another – if you think of supercolliders, if you think of astronomical observatories, it’s not a group of scientists getting together and spending two months together in close living quarters, eating your meals together, twelve-hour shifts with someone, for two months with no days off. That sort of bonding happens on an expedition. I can’t think of any other example in the sciences where that happens. Maybe it happens in the space shuttle [note: stations], but that’s only a few people. It’s not thirty scientists and they’re not all scientists in the space shuttle [note: stations]. That’s truly unique, I think, globally, in the science community of scientific ocean drilling.

BMR: Is there something we didn’t touch that you would like to talk about?

MC: I mentioned early on the opportunities for early career scientists and students. I think that’s extremely important. It was formative when I was an early career scientist and I see the benefits. I’ve seen the benefits through my whole career of sailing students on expeditions and early career scientists. It sets them up. It raises them to a level of international engagement that is so valuable for their future careers. And that’s a huge benefit for the younger scientists. [note: When IODP-MI dissolved at the end of the first phase of IODP (2003-2013), it had significant funds in the bank. The members of IODP-MI decided to endow an early career scientist prize through the joint auspices of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and the Japan Geoscience Union (JpGU). My proposal to name the prize in honor of Asahiko Taira was successful, and the Asahiko Taira International Scientific Ocean Drilling Research Prize was negotiated, finalized, and ultimately instituted in 2015 largely through the efforts of then-IODP-MI President/CEO Kiyoshi Suyehiro. The Taira Prize is awarded annually in recognition of outstanding, transdisciplinary research accomplishment in ocean drilling to an honoree within 15 years of receiving their Ph.D.]

BMR: Right. Well, thank you very much for your time.

MC: You’re most welcome.

From upper left to lower right:

RV Kairei voyage KR10-05 – Ontong Java Plateau, Western Pacific Ocean, 2010.  Photo courtesy of M. Coffin.

Mike and king penguins (Aptenodytes halli), Macquarie Island, Tasmania, Australia, 2002. Photo courtesy of M. Coffin.

Mike (Chief Scientist) and Tegan Sime (Voyage Manager, CSIRO) aboard RV Investigator voyage IN2020_V01, Southern Indian Ocean (Kerguelen Plateau/Broken Ridge), 2020. Photo courtesy of M. Coffin.

Mike sailing his 1926 Herreshoff S-Boat Silhouette, Maine, USA, 2020. Photo courtesy of M. Coffin.