URSABLOG: Journey To The Centre Of The World

There was a lot of talk earlier this year about the US taking steps to penalise China for its dominance of the global shipbuilding market. Most of it has died down now after the presidential elections, and will be forgotten soon enough – at least I hope so – as the smartest minds in the new administration concentrate on other things. But you never know, the less smarter minds may wish to put these ideas back on the table.

What it all boiled down to was the accusation that US shipbuilding had been muscled out of the international shipbuilding market by the unscrupulous Chinese who, using cheap labour and non-competitive practices including subsidies and government funded research, had uncut the rest of the world, and the US, by producing cheap and substandard tonnage. This was all plainly nonsense of course: the US has not had a globally competitive shipbuilding industry for decades, and its own shipbuilding industry has been cosseted and protected from harsh global competition by the Jones Act, which dictates that all ships trading in cabotage trades are built in the US. Some of the oldest ships still trading in the world today were built in the US. This is not a compliment to their quality of build or their longevity, but simply because the economics of building replacements in US shipyards are impossible: too expensive, outdated designs and long, long delivery times.

It should also be noted that the US – first in Japan after the Second World War, and then in South Korea after the Korean war, and then Taiwan – actually encouraged those nations to first develop their iron and steel industries as a step to (re)industrialisation, and by extension develop their shipbuilding capabilities. All these east Asian countries were, by the way, also significant recyclers of ships themselves until the 1980s. India has failed to move significantly in this direction, and Pakistan is unlikely to, but I do see the possibility of Bangladesh being able to build ships in the future, if only as subsidiaries of existing Chinese, Korean and Japanese shipyards. The conditions seem right, if they can get their political troubles in order.

Anyway, if you ever wanted an example of how the US seems to be losing its grip on the oceans you need look no further than the science of oceanography. In September the US National Science Foundation announced it was retiring the 46-year-old JOIDES RESOLUTION, built in Halifax in Canada, the flagship of the U.S.-led International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP). No new partner country was prepared to fill a budgetary gap, so the ship – owned by Sea1 Offshore, Norway – is now sitting, laid up, in its home harbour of Kristiansand with its laboratories stripped of equipment, and its crew paid off or reassigned.

As if to rub salt into the wound, the Chinese have recently unveiled their new ocean drilling ship MENG XIANG (Chinese for ‘dream’) to the world. The US$ 470 mill ship will begin drilling into seafloor rock and sediment next year at various sites throughout the world’s oceans to investigate plate tectonics, ancient marine climates, and deep-buried microbial life. Japan has its own drill research ship – CHIKYU, built Mitsubishi HI in 2005 – but this does little independent scientific research, and when it does it tends to be around Japan and Japanese waters.

US scientists are not particularly happy, but are being diplomatic. “I’m green with jealousy,” said Henry Dick, a geologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “I’m very happy that China has stepped up in providing a ship,” said James Austin, a seismic stratigrapher at the University of Texas at Austin. But, he added, “It’s a sad day for the United States.

Starting next year MENG XIANG will begin drilling into seafloor rock and sediment at sites throughout the world’s oceans including a daring mission to pierce Earth’s crust and reach the mantle below. At a workshop last month in Guangzhou, researchers discussed the research agenda and toured the ship, which has nine dedicated science laboratories and a drilling rig that promises to delve deeper than any previous research ship. “This ship has the capacity to answer fundamental climate, oceanographic, microbiological, and earth science questions … for the next 50 years,” says paleoceanographer Peter Bijl of Utrecht University. And it will be the Chinese that will be leading the search for answers.

MENG XIANG’s most notable feature is its capability to drill to a depth of 11,000 metres below the sea surface, compared with JOIDES RESOLUTION’s 8,385 metres and the 10,000 metres of CHIKYU. This means MENG XIANG could make history by boring into the mantle, past a boundary known as the Mohorovičić discontinuity, or the Moho. Named after the Croatian seismologist Andrija Mohorovičić – who observed that seismic waves travel through Earth faster below the Moho than above it – the Moho separates the crust from the mantle. Rocks brought to the surface in volcanic eruptions or recovered at midocean ridges, where the crust is thinnest, support that picture. But fresh rock samples from the Moho and the mantle could confirm their compositions and shed light on the formation and evolution of Earth’s crust.

To me and the latent – if amateur – geologist in me this is a big deal. Earth’s crust has never been penetrated, and even getting close to it and understanding its make-up could bring all sorts of benefits. China took up the Moho challenge because the country’s scientists played little role in the discovery of plate tectonics and decided it was time “for China to make big contributions to the international community,” Yaoling Niu, a petrologist with the Laoshan Laboratory, said during his workshop presentation.

And on the face of it, China wants to share this science with the rest of the world, welcoming international research proposals, with all core samples and data openly accessible to the global scientific community. They are planning a Deep Ocean Drilling Program to manage up to 30 drilling expeditions from between 2025 to 2035, according to Shouting Tuo, a sedimentologist at Tongji University.

Maybe some of the projects left orphaned by the end of IODP will be picked up by MENG XIANG. These include reconstructing sea level changes from 5 million years ago; looking for evidence of a 130-million-year-old ocean basin east of Taiwan that has since been swallowed by tectonic movements in the region; and probing the Mariana Trench, created by an oceanic crustal plate plunging into the mantle southeast of Japan, for tectonic, geochemical, and biological activity. Take a moment to note where these projects will be.

So what? You may ask. Well, knowing more about our world, including what we are standing on, can lead to great discoveries. After all, the space race between the US and the USSR – apart from putting men on the moon – had so many technological spin-offs that have since been incorporated into our daily lives for the better, that those countries who were at the forefront of developing the technologies to enable space travel benefitted the most. Likewise the knowledge we have gained simply by being able to explore our immediate surroundings has widened our understanding of light and time itself.

We are standing on a thin crust above a hot mantle, that itself sits on superheated core. Leaving aside the carbon-free energy that could be tapped for our benefit – a fantasy in my lifetime I am sure – what we could learn from the composition of what lies below the crust is now unknowable, but as from every scientific breakthrough in our brief history on this planet, the benefits outweigh the cost.

The hundreds of millions needed to build a new ship – like the original, it doesn’t even have to be built in the US – seem like small change compared to billions spent elsewhere. And this is not an accusation against either Republican or Democrat parties, but rather an illustration of what happens when a country – even the most powerful nation in the world – starts to look inwardly rather than outwardly, even if that direction is down, beneath the sea, and beneath the sea floor.

The US will never again – in my lifetime at least – become a global power in commercial shipbuilding. Their economy and infrastructure is not geared up for it. China, having developed so quickly in the decades since JOIDES RESOLUTION was delivered from the shipyard in Halifax, is. China did not corner the market in any different way than any other rising industrial power (including the US in the nineteenth century) has in the past. It started building ships because it could, not to take over from or undercut non-existent shipbuilding in the US.

The rise of China as a scientific power is something different however. This is benign technological transfer at work. China, as a state, wants to carry out scientific research in the world’s oceans; the US – apparently – does not. China is just providing the resources to enable it to happen. Power comes in many different forms – not just economic, political or cultural – including the intention and will to simply find out more. Will it be to its advantage? I’m sure it will. After all, history tells us that those societies that invest in scientific development usually reap unexpected dividends to their advantage. Whether they choose to share them with the rest of the world is another thing altogether.

Simon Ward