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doi:10.2204/iodp.proc.301.104.2005

Third-party funding and scientific instrumentation support models during ODP

Throughout the term of ODP, many national ODP funding agencies, such as NSF, identified research funds that could be granted for downhole tools and experiments independent of the commingled membership contributions that supported basic ODP coring, drilling, and logging operations. It was this kind of funding that supported the acquisition of the scientific instrumentation deployed in the first CORKs, as well as any submersible operations required after installation from the drillship. This model held for all the CORK installations during ODP and appears to be continuing at the beginning of IODP. It has some advantages, as well as disadvantages that are essentially complexities that can be handled by good communication and close cooperation among the investigators, the drilling program managers and engineers, funding agencies, and the scientific advisory structure.

The greatest advantage of this support model was leveraging additional funding and scientific and technical expertise toward scientific objectives of both ODP programmatic priority and national scientific importance. The instrumentation installed in the ODP CORKs was not inexpensive, nor was it readily available off the shelf. The program could have afforded from commingled funds neither the instrumentation nor the associated technical expertise to develop the instrumentation; nor could it have provided the even more costly postinstallation submersible time. The division of funding and responsibilities has required a close level of coordination among those involved, particularly in two aspects.

First, obtaining the third-party support for the scientific instrumentation and submersible support has entailed a dual proposal process, with the proposal for national funding for the instrumentation being submitted as the associated proposal for the drilling operation neared or reached a scheduling decision in the science advisory structure. This obviously has required extra work on the part of proponents in preparing proposals. That this approach has been made to work reasonably well is due in large part to the cooperation and interest of the national funding program managers (e.g., the NSF ODP office in the majority of cases).

Second, for the dual-funding model to work, the division of cost, engineering, and acquisition responsibilities must be defined very clearly and as early as possible in the process. In the past, this has been made to work by frequent communication and close cooperation among the scientific proponents and program engineers. The division of responsibilities for the original CORK (Fig. F5) was fairly straightforward, as follows: Drawing on commingled ODP program funds, the drilling operator provided the reentry cone, casing, and CORK body; this could be defined as the seafloor and subseafloor "infrastructure" in which was hung the scientific instrument string that was provided by scientific proponents with added support from national sources of ODP research funding. As noted above, the national ODP research funding also provided the submersible time and funding for associated activities after initial deployment from the drillship. This model set a precedent that could be applied to the multilevel ACORK and CORK-II models, with some careful attention required so that nothing "fell between the cracks" in defining the difference between program-provided "seafloor and subseafloor infrastructure" and scientist-provided "instrumentation" in those more complicated designs. For the ACORK (Fig. F6), the program provided the reentry cone, ACORK casing, packers, umbilicals, and bridge plug; the proponents provided the pressure logging instrumentation on the wellhead and instrument string for the central bore from national ODP funding, which also supported the necessary submersible time after the drilling operations. For the CORK-II (Fig. F7), the program provided the reentry cone, cased hole, instrument hanger and 4½ inch casing, umbilical tubing, and seal plug on which the downhole OsmoSamplers were run; the scientific proponents applied for national ODP funding to provide the downhole samplers and temperature loggers, pressure logging instrumentation on the wellhead, and necessary submersible time. The wireline CORK (Fig. F8) was funded entirely by the NSF, although DSDP and ODP had invested years earlier in establishing the reentry holes.

The greatest disadvantage of the dual-funding/responsibility model is that the expertise and documentation for the instrumentation installed in the CORKs resides with scientists/proponents and their engineers and is therefore neither maintained centrally within the program nor easily made available by the program to other proponents. In addition, this means that the program does not maintain a central record of updated instrumental status in the various installations. In practice, proponents other than our group have provided successful CORK instrumentation. For example, scientists and engineers from IFREMER provided a sophisticated instrument string that worked very well in one of the 1994 CORK installations (but unfortunately that CORK body did not seal the hole). Another example is the thermistor string provided by scientists and engineers from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) for the Nankai ACORKs (but that string could not be installed because of operational problems with both ACORKs).

Generally, the support model described above, although somewhat complicated, has been made to work well with careful coordination among scientists, program engineers, and program managers. There have been a few exceptions, which have occurred mostly when program engineering support has been requested or expected for postinstallation submersible operations but was not specifically identified in relevant operator budgets from commingled funds; this reinforces the need in current and future installations for early and frequent communication among proponents, program engineers and managers, submersible support engineers, and funding program managers. Whether this kind of model should hold throughout IODP is currently under debate; with sufficient resources, improvements can certainly be made.

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