ALT Some scientists have said the loss of the ship is secondary to the loss of the team that operates the ocean drilling program—roughly 130 employees at Texas A&M who plan the missions, maintain the JR and its instruments, travel with the ship, process and distribute cores, and handle many other tasks. “The biggest challenge will be the loss of expertise,” said Lang. “We’ve built up a lot of institutional knowledge over the past 50 years. A lot of small decisions go into how to approach ocean drilling, and it’s a lot more complex than I could ever get up to. We’re losing the group that has made these decisions day in, day out.” “We have this incredible cohort of lab technicians, program managers, drilling engineers, some of whom have been working on the ship since we started,” said Krissek. “I do not know of any way we will be able to keep most of those people.”

ALT COLDEX written in large block letters with the Antarctic continent in the center of the O. "Center for Oldest Ice Exploration" written underneath.

ALT Organic soil buried by tidal mud due to subsidence from the 1700CE Cascadia earthquake

ALT A group posing for a photo. The front row is kneeling. The back row has a person dressed as Davy Jones, a puffin, King Neptune, a spotted monster, a penguin holding Neptune's fork and the ship captain.

ALT A person with glasses, dark skin and hair, standing and smiling and holding a document in a clear tube. His nose has a blue chalk streak.

ALT A person dressed as Neptune talks into a shell as if it is a cell phone!

ALT Scientist x raying a split core of sediment.

ALT Parallel X ray images of sediment layers, rocks and curly features, which are burrows.