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Welcome to Atlantis Bank

Atlantis Bank formed on the seafloor as the Southwest Indian mid-ocean ridge spread apart along a tectonic fault (top). The lower-crust gabbro rock that formed Atlantis Bank was slowly pushed up to the surface over the course of 26 million years. Atlantis Bank makes an ideal target to try to drill to the Moho, the boundary between Earth’s crust and mantle, because there are no upper-crust basalts and dikes to drill through. WHOI geologist Henry Dick, a 2016 AAAS Fellow, led expeditions that drilled holes 735B in 1989 and U1473A in 2016, the first phases of a project to sample the Moho (bottom). (Illustration courtesy of Henry Dick, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)