You are here: Home / News / Orange Built Glomar Challenger Show As the United States was pushing a space program to get to the moon, a lesser known project was pursued to study the core of the ocean floor. The information gathered by the Ocean Drilling Project proved the tectonic plate and continental drift theories of geology. The core samples gathered in the exploration are still being used today. And the worldwide science community wouldn’t have the information without the blue collar workers in Orange. Levingston Shipbuilding Company construction the legendary Glomar Challenger. Pieces of the vessel are now in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution. The National Science Foundation and regents of the University of California, who oversaw the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego approved the Deep Sea Drilling Project on June 24, 1966, according to the Texas A&M University Ocean Drilling Project website. Levingston Shipbuilding Company in Orange was commissioned to build the ship with drilling equipment. The vessel was given the name Glomar (for global marine) Challenger. The vessel would help scientists explore the geology of the earth that had never been seen before. Levingston laid the keel on October 18, 1967. The official launch was held on March 23, 1968. The shipyard had a large launching ceremony reminiscent of ones during World War II. The Stark High Band under band director Don Miller performed in full uniform. The Glomar Challenger then sailed down the Sabine River to the Gulf of Mexico. It was the first part of many trips around the world for the next few years. After trials, the official project began on August 11, 1968. Encyclopedia Britannica said the vessel had a drilling derrick that was 140 feet tall. It was capable of drilling 5,570 feet deep into the ocean floor. During the first 30 months, the Glomar Challenger went to the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans, plus the Mediterranean and Red seas. The Glomar gathered cores from 624 sites. The drilling cores were 2.5 inches in diameter and were stored for study. The exploration discovered deep sea salt domes in the ocean floor. Oil is sometimes discovered in salt domes. The knowledge is still used by oil companies for drilling. Other information gathered from the cores is that the Mediterranean Sea was once a desert. Also the core samples helped prove German meteorologist Alfred Wegener had been correct in his theory of tectonic plates in the earth. The movement of the plates causes earthquakes and brought about the formation of the continents, which were once one mass. The Glomar Challenger served until 1983 and was scrapped. The Smithsonian Institution has the ship’s dynamic position system, the engine telegraph and thruster console stored. The 30-foot cores that were collected were split in half lengthwise and are stored at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego and Columbia University. Half of the cores are still used by scientists and the other half is archived. “Although itself a remarkable engineering feat, the Challenger was the site of many advances in deep oceanic drilling,” the
Texas A&M website said. Posted - February 12, 2010 Edited by Matthew Aid with William Burr and Thomas Blanton For more information contact: 202/994-7000
Washington, D.C., February 12, 2010 - For the first time, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has declassified substantive information on one of its most secret and sensitive schemes, "Project Azorian," the Agency codename for its ambitious plan to raise a sunken Soviet submarine from the floor of the Pacific Ocean in order to retrieve its secrets. Today the National Security Archive publishes
"Project Azorian: The Story of the Hughes Glomar Explorer," a 50-page article from the fall 1985 edition of the Agency's in-house journal Studies in Intelligence. Written by a participant in the operation whose identity remains classified, the article discusses the conception and planning of the retrieval effort and the creation of a special ship, the Glomar
Explorer, which raised portions of the submarine in August 1974. The National Security Archive had submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the CIA for the document on December 12, 2007. National Security Archive director Tom Blanton commented that "the Navy alternative to the Glomar Explorer--investigation by a deep sea submersible--sounds more convincing than the claim in the Studies in Intelligence article that Project Azorian advanced the
cutting edge of deep sea exploration the way the CIA did on aerial and satellite reconnaissance. To me, Glomar resembles the Bay of Pigs more than U-2 or Corona. On the latter, they brought in the best people, Ed Land and the Skunk Works, on the former, they only talked to themselves." Also published today for the first time are recently declassified White House memoranda of conversations from 1975 which recount the reactions of President Ford and cabinet members to ongoing news of press leaks about the Glomar Explorer, including Seymour Hersh's exposé in The New York Times on March 19, 1975. Project Azorian For the first time, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has declassified substantive information on one of its most secret and sensitive schemes, "Project Azorian," the Agency codename for its ambitious plan to raise a sunken Soviet submarine from the floor of the Pacific Ocean in order to retrieve its secrets. Today the National Security Archive publishes "Project Azorian: The Story of the Hughes Glomar Explorer," a "Secret" 50-page article from the fall 1985 edition of the Agency's in-house journal Studies in Intelligence. Written by a participant in the operation whose identity remains classified, the article discusses the conception and planning of the retrieval effort and the creation of a special ship Glomar Explorer, which raised portions of the submarine in August 1974. The National Security Archive submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the CIA for the document on December 12, 2007. Also published today for the first time are recently-declassified White House memoranda of conversations from 1975 recounting the reactions of President Ford and cabinet members to ongoing news of press leaks about the Glomar Explorer, including Seymour Hersh's exposé in The New York Times on March 19, 1975. The first sketchy details of the program were published by the Los Angeles Times in February 1975 and by columnist Jack Anderson in a March 18 radio program, and were further developed in Hersh's March 19 article in the New York Times. Since then the CIA has been so adamant in its refusal to declassify any material related to "Project Azorian" that it will neither confirm nor deny that the operation ever existed. This doctrine changed slightly in the 1990s, when the Agency declassified a videotape given previously to Russian president Boris Yeltsin showing the burial at sea of the Russian crewmen who were found in the portion of the submarine that the CIA raised to the surface. But other than this videotape, for the past 35 years the public has had to rely for everything that it knew about the project on a very small number of books and articles written without access to the classified records. (Note 1) This newly-released CIA document vastly expands what we know about this poorly-understood operation. Despite significant redactions made by the CIA, the article contains a detailed chronological history of the program from its inception until Jack Anderson published the first hard details about the program in April 1975. Internal evidence suggests that the article was written in 1978, but it was prepared at such a high level of classification that it was apparently unpublishable until the Agency made decisions in 1985 to downgrade it to "Secret." The story of "Project Azorian" began on March 1, 1968, when a Soviet Golf-II submarine, the K-129 (the CIA history refers to the submarine by its pendant number - 722), carrying three SS-N-4 Sark nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, sailed from the naval base at Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula to take up its peacetime patrol station northeast of Hawaii. If war had broken out, the K-129 would have launched its three ballistic missiles, each carrying a one megaton nuclear warhead, at targets along the west coast of the United States. But something went terribly wrong, for in mid-March 1968 the submarine suffered a catastrophic accident and sank 1,560 miles northwest of Hawaii with the loss of its entire crew. Interestingly, the CIA history is silent on the cause of the accident, mentioning neither how the agency came to learn of the sub's demise nor the exact location of its resting place 16,500 feet below the surface of Pacific. It is quite likely that this information was Top Secret, and could not be included in the article at the Secret classification level, despite the fact that books and articles about the project back in the 1970s mention that the U.S. Navy's SOSUS underwater sonar system detected the location of the sunken submarine. The article traces in detail the trials and tribulations of "Project Azorian" over the next six years, culminating on August 8, 1974, when the commercial vessel specially modified to perform the secret mission, the Hughes Glomar Explorer, raised a portion of the K-129 to the surface and took it to Hawaii for detailed examination. The declassified article is replete with information that has never been made public before now:
Unfortunately, the CIA made significant deletions from the text of the article, which makes it extremely difficult to accurately gauge just how successful "Project Azorian" was. For example, the CIA refused to declassify any information concerning the massive cost overruns, which threatened to shut down the program during its early stages. Subsequent reports estimate that as much as $500 million (in 1974 dollars) were spent. Nor did the declassified portions of the CIA article answer the critically important questions of how much of the submarine the Hughes Glomar Explorer managed to bring to the surface, or what intelligence information was derived from the exploitation of the portions of the sub that were recovered. Unfortunately, this material apparently was either redacted from the text or not included because of the high classification assigned to this material. So what can we surmise about what "Project Azorian" accomplished? Because the CIA article provides no answers to this critical question, the prevailing school of thought maintains that the project failed to accomplish its primary goals. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh's March 1975 New York Times article reported that the mission was, in the opinion of senior U.S. Navy officials, a failure, because the CIA did not recover any of the K-129's SS-N-4 nuclear-armed ballistic missiles. Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew's 1998 book Blind Man's Bluff reported that only a 38-foot long forward section of the K-129 was recovered, including the sub's torpedo compartment and its store of Russian nuclear torpedoes. Ninety percent of the highly-fragile submarine, including the conning tower, missile compartment, control room, radio shack and engine room, broke free and fell back to the ocean floor, disintegrating on contact. "Back to the ocean floor went the intact [SS-N-4] nuclear missile, the codebooks, decoding machines, the burst transmitters. Everything the CIA most wanted to reclaim." And because only small fragments survived the disintegration of the submarine when it hit bottom, the CIA decided not to make a second attempt to retrieve what was left. Sontag and Drew argue that a Navy proposal to use a deep-sea submersible to probe the sunken vessel was never properly vetted, although it may have produced better results. (Note 2) There apparently were some tangential benefits that accrued from the project. In June 1993, a panel of Russian experts prepared a report for President Boris Yeltsin, using only information made available to them by the Russian intelligence services, which concluded that the CIA recovered at least two nuclear-armed torpedoes from the portion of the K-129 that it managed to bring to the surface. According to the report, the level of plutonium radiation the CIA team on the Hughes Glomar Explorer encountered was consistent with two nuclear warheads. (Note 3) This conclusion is partially confirmed in the surviving text of the CIA article, which reported that Glomar Explorer's recovery crew had to deal with plutonium contamination once the sub was raised to the surface caused by the one-point detonation of the high explosive components of one or more of the K-129's nuclear torpedoes. (p. 46) So was "Project Azorian" a waste of time and taxpayer money? We will not know for sure until the CIA declassifies the remainder of this article and other documents relating to this operation. Read the Documents
Document 1: [Author excised], "Project Azorian: The Story of the Hughes Glomar Explorer," Studies in Intelligence, Fall 1985, Secret, Excised copy Document 2: Memorandum of Conversation, February 7, 1975, 5:22-5:55 p.m., Confidential, Excised copy Calling his national security team together, President Ford expressed his worries about leaks to the press, such as reports on recent National Security Council discussions of the SALT [Strategic Arms Limitations Talks]. During the course of the discussion, Director of Central Intelligence (DCI)William Colby interjected that he had been in touch with the Los Angeles Times, whose editors were going to publish an article about the Glomar Explorer. He said that he called Franklin D. Murphy, the chief executive officer of the Times-Mirror Company, which published the Times, but his call was to no avail. The next afternoon, February 8, 1975, it ran a story entitled "U.S. Reported After Russian Submarine/Sunken Ship Deal by CIA." Document 3: Memorandum of Conversation, "[Jennifer?] Meeting,"March 19, 1975, 11:20 a.m., Secret, Excised copy The day that Seymour Hersh's story appeared in The New York Times, Ford also met with top advisers. Secretary of Defense (and former Director of Central Intelligence) Schlesinger recommended acknowledging the "bare facts" because it was implausible to deny the story. DCI Colby, however, thought otherwise and his advice prevailed. Remembering that President Eisenhower's admission of the downed U-2 exacerbated the 1960 crisis, he suggested that confirming the story would put Moscow under "pressure to respond." Notes 1. Two books have been written about the project: Clyde W. Burleson, The Jennifer Project (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1977); and Roy Varner and Wayne Collier, A Matter of Risk (New York: Random House, 1977). See also Seymour Hersh, "C.I.A. Salvage Ship Brought Up Part of Soviet Sub Lost in 1968, Failed to Raise Atom Missiles, The New York Times, March 19, 1975; "The Great Submarine Snatch," Time, March 31, 1975, pp. 20-27; Seymour Hersh, "Human Error Is Cited in '74 Glomar Failure," The New York Times, December 9, 1976, pp. 1, 55. See also the CIA's review of Clyde Burleson's book in John Milligan, "The Jennifer Project," Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 23, No. 1, Spring 1979, p. 45. 2. Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage (New York: Public Affairs, 1998), 83-84, 180, 198. 3. Jeffrey T. Richelson, A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century (NY: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 352n, citing William J. Broad, "Russia Says U.S. Got Sub's Atom Arms," The New York Times, June 20, 1993, p. 4; "CIA Raising USSR Sub Raises Questions," FBIS-SOV-92-145, July 28, 1992, pp. 15-16. What did Glomar Challenger Discover 1968?But the purpose of the Glomar Challenger was scientific exploration. One of the most important discoveries was made during Leg 3.
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Glomar Challenger: Drillship of the Deep Sea Drilling Project.. What discoveries were made by Ocean Drilling?Major Scientific Accomplishments
Scientific ocean drilling has advanced understanding of solid Earth cycles, revealed the flow of fluid and microbe ecosystems within the seafloor, and gathered extensive information on Earth's climate history.
What was the Glomar Challenger equipped with?For 25 years, the Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) operated the Glomar Challenger, a research ship 400 feet (122 meters) in length that was equipped with a drilling platform and scientific laboratories.
Why was the Glomar Challenger built?But from concept to launch, the Hughes Glomar Explorer really had only one purpose: raise the sunken Soviet Golf-II class submarine from 1968 – and any ballistic missiles. In 1972, construction began in a Delaware River dry-dock south of Philadelphia.
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