The Dallol area (northern Afar, Ethiopia) is the ideal field lab to study the birth of a future ocean. The ADD-ON workshop brought together scientists from different disciplines, government agencies, local universities, and communities to plan a scientific drilling into the Dallol deep subsurface. This drilling will provide unique archives to resolve questions related to rift processes, seismic and volcanic activity, climate change, the deep biosphere, geothermal energy, and water resources.

We conducted seismic crosshole experiments with a sparker source in order to obtain a high-resolution subsurface velocity model in the glacially overdeepened Tannwald Basin (ICDP site 5068_1). The data show complex wave fields that contain a lot of information but also present challenges. Nevertheless, isotropic first-arrival travel-time tomography provides the first high-resolution subsurface models that correlate well with the sonic logs and the core recovered from one of the three boreholes.

A set of seismic reflection surveys were conducted in May 2019 in the Ossola Valley, Western Italian Alps, to image the geologic structure below two proposed boreholes. The boreholes plan to penetrate the upper 2 km of the lower continental crust, a zone of much scientific interest. The seismic surveys have defined the valley structure to depths of 550 m, determined the dip of geological banding, and ruled out the possibility of major geologic drilling hazards that could be encountered.

A total of 42 Earth scientists from 14 countries met in Gioia dei Marsi, central Italy, on 23 to 27 October 2023 to explore the potential for deep drilling of the thick lake sediment sequence of the Fucino Basin. The aim was to reconstruct the history of climate, ecosystem, and biodiversity changes and of the explosive volcanism and tectonics in central Italy over the last 3.5 million years, constrained by a detailed radiometric chronology.