One of us (Art Maxwell) played a pioneering role in proposing the first scientific ocean drilling program during the 1960s. The other (Margaret Leinen) was a graduate student at the time whose research interest in the history of the ocean depended on the core samples collected via this new program. Together, we have watched scientific ocean drilling evolve in many ways. The focus of drilling expanded from an effort to recover samples that could resolve hypotheses about Earth’s crust (the nature of the Moho, plate tectonics, and global volcanism) to one that addresses hypotheses about the history of the ocean itself, about the interactions between the ocean, ice sheets, mountain building, and climate, and now to one that studies the coevolution of the ocean, oceanic crust, and life.

Maxwell, A.E., and M. Leinen. 2019. Foreword. Oceanography 32(1):13, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2019.107.

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