After 60 Years of Trying, Geologists Finally Pried Rocks From Earth's Upper Mantle

To understand the geologic processes roiling beneath the Earth’s crust, it helps to have samples of what exactly is going on down there.
For more than 60 years, scientists have been trying to retrieve a rock from the upper mantle, but have failed to extract a large core sample. That, however, changed earlier this month when researchers onboard the JOIDES Resolution—the flagship vessel of the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) that’s been scientifically scouring the ocean floor for decades—announced that they’d successfully retrieved a 1,000-kilometer-long core of rock from the Earth’s upper mantle, consisting mainly of the rock peridotite.
“These are the types of rock we’ve been hoping to recover for a long time,” project co-lead Susan Lang, a biogeochemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told Science.
After 60 Years of Trying, Geologists Finally Pried Rocks From Earth's Upper Mantle