The DSDP, which was succeeded in 1984 by the Ocean Drilling Program, was itself a successor to the unsuccessful Mohole Project in which scientists attempted to drill an extremely deep hole reaching to the Earth's mantle. (Such attempts to reach the mantle are now being made on dry land; see drilling.) One major accomplishment of the DSDP was to demonstrate the existence of seafloor spreading and to prove that plate tectonics is the correct model of crustal geodynamics. Cores taken by the DSDP from the Pacific and Indian Oceans have been stored at the Scripps Institution; those from the Atlantic Ocean have been housed in the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. The cores remain available at those institutions for study by any qualified scientist.
Robert S. Dietz
Bibliography: Hsu, K. J., The Challenger at Sea: A Ship that Revolutionized Earth Science (1992).
