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• Scientific Objectives

Hadal trenches are the deepest places in the ocean, where one tectonic plate slips beneath another, generating powerful earthquakes that can trigger devastating tsunamis. By drilling into these remote seafloor basins to recover sediments buried for thousands of years—samples no one has ever accessed before—we are uncovering the hidden long-term history of giant earthquakes and exploring how these extreme events shape deep-sea ecosystems and drive biogeochemical cycles of carbon and other critical elements in our Earth system. Our targets are:

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• Uncover the hidden history of earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan Trench, by drilling into one of the deepest parts of the World´s ocean.

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• Understand how and when giant earthquakes struck in the past.

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• Evaluate the influence of earthquake-induced fluid migration (discharge) in trench-fill sediments.

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• Learn how massive earthquakes impact Earth’s carbon cycle and deep-sea life, by recovering never-before-seen deep-sea sediments

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• Science Plan and Operation overview

We will drill two holes at Site JTC-1A to collect continuous core samples from the searfloor to 160 m below seafloor.

The core samples will be retrieved every ~9.5 m until the target depth, and analyzed onboard in various fields such as sedimentology, stratigraphy, structural and earthquake geology, paleoseismology, geochemistry and biogeochemical cycles, and microbiology