The International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP), organized by an international consortium, provides infrastructure for scientific drilling on the Earth’s continents including their continental shelves. ICDP puts excellent scientific ideas into practice to better understand the workings of Planet Earth. The most unique and important point of ICDP is that the continents provide access to a record of Earth’s history that stretches back to about 4 billion years. ICDP projects investigate the thermal evolution of Earth, the onset of plate tectonics, the generation of the magnetic field, the origin and evolution of life, the effects of large impact events, the formation of the world’s most significant ore deposits, the evolution and oxygenation of our atmosphere and oceans, past climates, global glaciations, mass extinctions that led to modern Earth, and perform in-situ monitoring and probing of volcanoes and fault zones. Such studies are crucial to answer fundamental questions related to the evolution of the Earth-Life system, the processes that generate geohazards, access to resources essential for modern society, and past and present climate change.