Introduction of the Core Repository for the Chinese Continental Environmental Scientific Drilling Program
(CESD Program)

Based on the development tendency and challenges of the international earth environmental science and the new guidelines of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) (“facing the world's frontiers of science and technology, the country's major needs and the main battlefield of the national economy, taking the lead in realizing the remarkable development in science and technology, and in building the highland of innovative talents, the high-level think tank for science and technology of China, and the world-class research institution”), the Institute of Earth Environment (IEE), CAS, actively integrated existing resources, and constructed a world-class, all-around open earth environment scientific research platform, including the “Continental environmental core testing system and experimental simulation center”, the “Continental environmental information and simulation system”, and the “Earth environment field observation system”, relying on the State Key Laboratory of Loess and Quaternary Geology, the Xi'an Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Center, and the Core base and supporting facilities. The aims are to promote the independent and original innovation of geosciences, especially the earth environment study of China, to make new contributions to the development of theoretical models of environmental system interactions and the understanding of the mechanisms of global environmental change, to provide new thoughts and scientific basis for China's sustainable development strategy of environment, economy and society. It will also play an important role in promoting the study of the international continental environment and will be built into a base of international high-level continental environmental research, training of young scientists in geosciences, and popularization of public geosciences knowledge.

Since the beginning of the century, the IEECAS has been actively conducting researches on the Chinese Continental Environmental Scientific Drilling (CESD), and arranging studies on the continental environment of China, especially the geological history of the ecological environment at the “Silk Road Economic Belt”. Many precious geological and biological records have been acquired. Currently, the core base at IEECAS is the only one of earth environment and global change studies in China. As a main component of the earth environment research platform in western China, the continental environmental drill core store system of the IEECAS consists of two refrigerated stores, one freezing store, as well as a core scanning and cutting room. The two refrigerated stores, located in the south and north, are specifically used to store borehole cores. Covering an area of more than 400 square meters, they contain 38 groups of high core racks with 20 layers in each group, and 11 groups of low core racks with 7 layers in each group, and consequently the totaling storage area is more than 3,000 square meters, which can store nearly 20,000 cores of 1.5-2.0 meters, with a total length of over 40,000 meters.

With the strong support of Ministry of Science and Technology, National Natural Science Foundation of China, CAS, and International Continental Drilling Program (ICDP), the CESD has carried out systematic environmental science deep-well drilling programs in the extreme arid area and the monsoon humid area in China. High-quality sediment cores have been successively retrieved from the Lop Nor, Heqing paleolake in Yunnan province, Jianghan plain, western Chinese Loess Plateau and Lake Qinghai, etc., and about 17,000 meters of eolian/lacustrine sediment cores have been obtained. Overall, we have obtained many precious geological and biological samples and records and established a cold storage repository of the continental environmental cores that meets international standards. Scientists from all over the world have been attracted to participate in the study of East Asian’s paleoenvironment. This created a new situation of China's continental environmental drilling research and has gradually pushed it to the first-class of the world.

During the past two decades, using a variety of paleoenvironmental archives (such as the loess, lake sediment, etc.), the IEECAS has carried out a lot of pioneering work in the paleoenvironmental studies of East Asian, and obtained a series of important academic achievements supported by the big data. For example, new eolian red clay sequence since at least 25 Ma ago on the western Chinese Loess Plateau and the inland Asia desertification history, new theory of glacial-interglacial Indian summer monsoon dynamics revealed by a 2.8 Ma high-resolution continental record from the Heqing paleolake, Yunnan Province, the timing and mechanisms of paleoenvironmental changes in the Tarim Basin revealed by the 7-Ma aridity record from a 1000-m long drilling core from Lop Nur, influence of Atlantic meridional overturning circulation on the East Asian winter monsoon revealed by the high-resolution loess sediments, and the uplift history of the Tibetan Plateau inferred from multi-records. More than 100 related articles have been published in scientific journals such as Nature, Science, PNAS, Nature Geoscience, Geology, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Global and Planetary Change, Climate Dynamics, Quaternary Research, Science China, Chinese Science Bulletin, etc., with more than 10,000 times of citations. Based on these results, two times of National Natural Science Award (second class) and one time of the Top Ten Scientific Advances in China have been rewarded to the IEECAS. These achievements have been widely concerned and recognized by the international academia and provide a unique condition for the construction of an innovative demonstration platform for the study of paleoenvironment in East Asia.

At present, the IEECAS is expanding the cooperation with the city of Xi’an and planning to build an innovation research center for earth environment science. At that time, the new continental environmental drilling core base will serve as a large infrastructure that covers terrestrial shallow environmental cores in East Asia and even across the global. It will also be a large node that constitutes an important part of the International Continental Drilling Program (ICDP). It is expected to be a public research platform which is opens to the study of global continental environment, to promote the independent and original innovation of earth environment science in China and even in the world, and to contribute to the establishment of the theoretical model of the interaction of different environmental systems on the earth surface, and the theoretical study of the matter and energy exchange during the interactions between different layers of the earth. The drill core store will be a first-class base of international high-level continental environmental research, and a high-level talent training base in the field of earth science. It will make fundamental, strategic and forward-looking contributions to the understanding of earth science theories, especially the environmental change processes and dynamics in Asia, as well as serve the national needs such as the construction of the Silk Road Economic Belt.