Deep Drilling into a Mantle Plume Volcano: The Hawaii Scientific Drilling Project

The Hawaii Scientific Drilling Project drilled and cored two holes in Hilo, Hawaii, the deeper reaching a depth of 3508 mbsl, and it retrieved a total of 4600 meters of rock core (525 meters from the Mauna Loa volcano and the remainder from the Mauna Kea volcano). The Mauna Loa core extends the continuous lava stratigraphy of that volcano back to 100 ka and reveals major changes in lava geochemistry over that time period. The Mauna Kea core spans an age range from about 200 ka to perhaps 700 ka, and when combined with surface outcrops, it provides a 700-kyr record of the lava output from a single volcano. During the time covered by the lavas from the core, the volcano drifted some 60-80 km across the melting region of the Hawaiian mantle plume, and therefore the HSDP rock core provides the first systematic cross-sectional sampling of a deep mantle plume. The geochemical characterization of the core, which involved an international team of forty scientists over a period of fifteen years provides information about mantle plume structure and ultimately about the deepest parts of the Earth's mantle. The study of the lava core (which still continues) has provided unprecedented information about the internal structure of a large oceanic volcano and the time scale over which volcanoes grow. The hole also provides an intriguing glimpse of a complex subsurface hydrological regime that differs greatly from the generalized view of ocean island hydrology. Drilling conditions were favorable in the subaerial parts of the volcanic section, where coring was generally fast and efficient. The submarine part of the lava section, made up primarily of volcanogenic sediments and pillow lavas, proved considerably more difficult to drill. Some of the difficulties and considerable additional expense were due to pressurized aquifers at depth and a few critical mistakes made while setting casing. Even with the more difficult conditions, the project retrieved about 2400 meters of nearly continuous core from the submarine section of Mauna Kea. Overall, the HSDP project was highly successful even though the original target depth was about 20% deeper than the final hole depth. As expected, the project results answer several important questions about oceanic volcanoes, mantle plumes, and ocean island water resources, but they raise many more that might be addressed with further moderate-depth drilling in other Hawaiian volcanoes.