21st Century Drilling Workshops Project - Building capacity in the digital domain using scientific ocean drilling legacy material

The success of 55+ years of scientific ocean drilling through the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) and its predecessors has provided the international scientific ocean drilling (ISOD) community with a wealth of legacy material and data. These physical and digital archives are stored in the three IODP core repositories and several programme databases. Greater utilisation of legacy archives is anticipated as ISOD enters its next phase starting in 2025. For instance, advances in dedicated Earth Science software now make it possible to generate digital representations of cores and use these as a primary data source (e.g., through packages like Code for Ocean Drilling Data, or CODD; Wilkens et al., 2017). There is significant scope for integrating these “virtual cores” and data derived from them following the re-analysis of physical “legacy core” stored in IODP’s core repositories. This integration offers one pathway to increase the capacity and utilisation of legacy material in the future.

The 21^st Century Drilling Workshops Project aimed to test best practices for the re-analysis and integration of physical and digital IODP/ODP/DSDP legacy material through four global workshops hosted at all three core repositories. These workshops also tested best practices for training early career researchers in hands-on core analysis. Finally, the linked workshops also addressed the scientific objectives of tracing changes in ice-rafted debris (IRD) and biological responses to shifting Antarctic fronts in the Southern Ocean due to Miocene ice volume variability. To achieve this, the four workshops targeted five sites spread across the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific sectors of the Southern Ocean.

The first workshop was hosted as part of J-DESC’s RECORD ReC23-01 at the Kochi Core Centre (KCC, Japan) in August 2023. Two ECORD MagellanPlus 21^st Century Drilling Workshops were held at the Bremen Core Repository (BCR, Germany) in April and November 2024. The final USSSP 21^st Century Drilling workshop was held in February 2025 at the Gulf Coast Repository (GCR, USA). RECORD ReC23-01 investigated DSDP Site 266 (Indian Ocean Sector), MagellanPlus Workshop 1 and 2 respectively investigated ODP Site 704 and ODP Sites 1090 and 1092 (Atlantic Ocean Sector), while the USSSP Workshop will investigate a Pacific Sector site. The target sites were carefully chosen to address the scientific objectives while ensuring coverage of sites spanning IODP’s entire history. This approach enabled the workshops to identify potential differences in the analytical requirements of legacy material depending on the age of the cores.

Through the four workshops, we have brought together ~80 researchers (early career to experienced) from a wide range of IODP and non-IODP countries. Though linked by common goals, each workshop had its own specific focus and developed a path tailored toward participant needs and site-specific requirements. By conducting the workshops sequentially, we had the opportunity to evaluate our approaches and adapt them as appropriate. Here, we aim to illustrate initial research highlights alongside several case studies highlighting best practice approaches for investigating digital and physical legacy material to provide powerful research and training opportunities for the next generation researchers engaged with ISOD.