NanTroSEIZE drilling set for September start

[Grant]

It promises to be one of the grand scientific challenges of this decade.

Researchers are about to drill down into an earthquake zone at the Nankai Trough off the coast of Japan. The project, which will cost hundreds of millions of dollars over the next 10 years, is being coordinated by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Programme. It seeks to understand the causes of deadly quakes and tsunami by pulling up cores for study and by putting down sensors to monitor changes in the rock. The Nankai Trough Seismogenic Zone Experiment (NanTroSEIZE) expects to get under way in September.

It is focused on a region of the sea floor that has been responsible for immense tremor events, including the 1944 Tonankai (Magnitude 8.1) and 1946 Nankaido (Magnitude 8.3) earthquakes. "The place we are going to has a history of disastrous earthquakes and tsunami every 100 or 200 years; and these have resulted in the deaths of many people," explained Chief Project Scientist Masataka Kino****a, from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (Jamstec).

"There is a strong need in the Japanese community to know what is going on under the sea floor," he told BBC News. He was speaking here at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly meeting.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Drillers target earthquake zone