Pre-Cruise Report for Antarctic Marine Sediment Sampling Expedition in 1995

AGSO Cruise 149 of the R.V. Aurora Australis planned a marine geoscience program in Prydz Bay, the MacRobertson Shelf, and the Kerguelen Plateau during February-April 1995. The Australian Ocean Data Network hosts this pre-cruise report detailing scientific aims and methods for studying sedimentary records to understand past climate and ice sheet changes. The cruise targeted three geographical features to reconstruct environmental history over intervals from 10,000 to 5,000,000 years.

Use Cases

• Analyze sediment core data from Prydz Bay trough-mouth fans to reconstruct Lambert Glacier-Amery Ice Shelf fluctuations over the last 5 million years.
• Study sediment trap records from MacRobertson Shelf basins to understand modern sedimentary processes and Plio-Pleistocene environmental history.
• Examine depositional basin sequences from the Kerguelen Plateau to trace variations in the polar front and water mass reorganization during glacial-interglacial cycles.
• Correlate sedimentary evidence from the three target areas to build statements of Antarctic and Southern Ocean paleoenvironments for the 0-10,000 year and 0-160,000 year intervals.

Strengths

• Report outlines specific scientific goals targeting three distinct geographical features (Prydz Bay fan, MacRobertson Shelf traps, Kerguelen Plateau basins).
• Describes a clear temporal framework for paleoenvironmental reconstruction across three key intervals: 0-10k, 0-160k, and 0-5M years.

Limitations

• Dataset consists of pre-cruise planning documents (HTML, PDF) rather than the actual collected sample data or measurements.
• No quantitative data (e.g., row counts, column names, sample sizes) from the cruise outcomes are provided in this record.

Provenance

Source

Australian Ocean Data Network

Collection Method

Planned marine survey involving sediment sampling and coring from the R.V. Aurora Australis research vessel.

Time Range

Cruise planned for February-April 1995; paleoenvironmental study targets time intervals from 0 to 5,000,000 years before present.

Freshness

null

Geography

Southern Ocean regions: Prydz Bay, MacRobertson Shelf (Antarctica), and Kerguelen Plateau.