Leg 188 Synthesis: Cenozoic Paleoenvironment Transitions in Prydz Bay, Antarctica

Ocean Drilling Program Legs 119 and 188 provide direct evidence for Cenozoic environmental shifts in East Antarctica. Cores from Sites 1165-1167 reveal a transition from a Late Cretaceous alluvial plain with conifer woodland to a glaciated marine shelf by the Oligocene. The dataset, sourced from Geoscience Australia Data, includes evidence of the first ice sheet advance onto the shelf and uses seismic data to fill gaps in the early Oligocene to early Miocene record.

Use Cases

• Reconstructing Late Cretaceous to Eocene terrestrial ecosystems based on pollen and sediment descriptions.
• Modeling the timing and drivers of the transition from a fluvio-deltaic to a marine glacial environment.
• Analyzing sediment grain textures to identify the onset of mountain glaciation in the late Eocene.
• Interpreting seismic data to infer continental shelf progradation and submarine canyon formation.

Strengths

• Direct evidence from physical sediment cores drilled at multiple sites across the continental margin.
• Synthesis covers a long-term geological record from the Late Cretaceous through the Cenozoic.
• Combines core data with seismic interpretation to address gaps in the physical record.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to data_gov_au, focusing solely on the Prydz Bay region.

Provenance

Source

Geoscience Australia Data

Collection Method

Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) coring and seismic data interpretation.

Time Range

Late Cretaceous to Cenozoic (focused on late Eocene to Oligocene transition)

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-14 03:01:18.805898; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Prydz Bay region, East Antarctica