The Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) was an ocean drilling project operated from 1968 to 1983. The program was considered to be successful as evidenced by the data and publications that have resulted from it and is now supported by Texas A&M University, although for the years of its operations these were all coordinated by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. DSDP provided crucial data to support the seafloor spreading hypothesis and helped to prove the theory of plate tectonics. DSDP was the first of three international scientific ocean drilling programs that have operated over more than 40 years.