An international effort to drill into the floor of the Indian Ocean in an effort to reach below the Earth’s crust for the first has come up short. The expedition on the ship, the Joides Resolution, had set out to drill down to 4,265 feet in a stretch of ocean floor off Africa known as the Atlantis Bank gabbroic massif. Gabbro is an intrusive igneous rock that forms when magma is trapped beneath Earth's surface and cools slowly. But the researchers, who had been on the expedition since Nov. 30, were only able to drill down to 2,588 feet, according...
