Following extensive modernization and shakedown cruises in the tropics, the drilling vessel JOIDES Resolution sailed north in July to the Bering Sea, seeking to understand the role of this Arctic gateway in global climate change. Since the conclusion of a 2004 coring expedition in the central Arctic Ocean, the scientific community has anticipated acquisition of new geological cores and data that address the age and effects of the Bering Strait gateway as seawater flows from the Pacific to the Arctic. The last expedition for scientific drilling in the Bering Sea was in the early 1970s.

The two-month expedition recovered about six kilometers of seafloor cores that span several million years of geologic history and record the onset of the Pleistocene Ice Ages. On the cruise, OSU paleooceanographer Alan Mix acted as Stratigraphic Correlator, which he described as "assembling all the bits and pieces of the jigsaw puzzle from individual cores into a coherent whole, and assembling a consistent age and depth model that everybody on board will use."

Researchers from around the world are now studying the cores. Most are stored in the IODP core repository in Kochi, Japan; a selection was shipped to the OSU repository in Corvallis, for CT-scanning with the advanced three-dimensional medical imaging system at OSU.

Said Mix, "this new tool will provide unprecedented clarity for understanding finely layered sediments that occur in low-oxygen dead zones," which the expedition discovered in the Bering Sea.

One week after the expedition, OSU oceanographers including Alan Mix, Bob Duncan, Rick Colwell, Rob Harris, and Joe Stoner, along with graduate students Brandon Briggs, Sarah Strano, and Summer Praetorius, traveled to an international science planning meeting in Bremen, Germany, where 600 researchers from around the world prioritized future ocean-drilling projects that seek answers to pressing science questions related to climate change, deep-sea bacteria, tectonics and earthquakes, and more.

As quoted in the international journal, Nature, Mix said in his keynote address that prime targets will include the role of greenhouse gases such as CO2 in transitions between cold and warm climates, and the magnitude, speed and distribution of resulting sea-level changes.

Other projects plan to drill through ocean subduction zones, where colliding plates cause catastrophic earthquakes and tsunamis, and to understand newly discovered bacterial ecosystems deep below the sea floor.