The new decadal International Ocean Discovery Program science plan covers a 10-year period of operation and highlights four main themes, encompassing a total of 14 scientific challenges. These themes are climate and ocean change: reading the past, informing the future; biosphere frontiers: deep life, biodiversity, and environmental forcing of ecosystems; Earth connections: deep processes and their impact on Earth’s surface environment; Earth in motion: processes and hazards on human time scales. After the theory of plate tectonics led to an epoch revolution of Earth science, the new decadal scientific ocean drilling has the greatest potentiality to trigger the other one.