The two-month mission of the largest American oceanographic vessel JOIDES Resolution in the Aegean between December 2022-February 2023, where it studied the volcanoes around Santorini, doing relevant research drilling, was to be one of its last trips.

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced that the ship, which revolutionized marine research, is to be “retired” in 2024.

Many scientists hoped that the ship would continue until 2028, but this ultimately will not happen, mainly due to the high cost of its operation. The 45-year-old vessel has annual expenses of about $72 million.

The withdrawal of JOIDES is bad news for the oceanographic research of the International Ocean Exploration Program (IODP), in the context of which the recent scientific drilling in the Greek seas took place.

“This is a disaster for ocean science in the US,” he said Nature geophysicist Jamie Austin of the University of Texas; The marine geologist spoke of a “not unexpected but nevertheless very disappointing decision, a big blow to the global research community” Henk Brinkhuis of the Royal Netherlands Institute of Marine Research.

The other IODP partners (14 European countries, Canada, Japan, India, Australia, etc.) agreed to cooperate without the US after 2024, to promote offshore drilling, using other vessels. Japan has the large oceanographic drilling vessel Chikyu, while China is already building one of its own. It is possible that American scientists, in the absence of their own ship, will now be forced to use ships of other countries.

It remains to be seen whether the US National Science Foundation will build another large oceanographic ship to replace the JOIDES Resolution. “We can’t work without a ship, we have to travel to the sea, drill, take subsurface cores to study them,” said geochemist Muhammad Hassan of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

JOIDES Resolution, owned by Siem Offshore and managed by Texas A&M University, will make six more research missions, the last of which will be a paleoclimate mission to the north of Iceland in September 2024.