Total Sediment Thickness of the World's Oceans and Marginal Seas, Version 2

Full description

This data collection is associated with the publication: Whittaker, J. M., Goncharov, A., Williams, S. E., Müller, R. D., & Leitchenkov, G. (2013). Global sediment thickness data set updated for the Australian-Antarctic Southern Ocean. Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, 14(8), 3297-3305. doi: 10.1002/ggge.20181

Publication Abstract

This update replaces the original Total Sediment Thickness of the World's Oceans & Marginal Seas (Divins, 2003). NGDC's global ocean sediment thickness grid (Divins, 2003) has been updated for the Australian-Antarctic region (60°-155°E, 30°-70°S). New seismic reflection and refraction data have been used to add detail to the conjugate Australian and Antarctic margins and intervening ocean floor where previously regional sediment thickness patterns were poorly known. On the margins, sediment thickness estimates were computed from velocity-depth functions from sonobuoy/refraction velocity solutions ground-truthed against seismic reflection data. For the Southeast Indian Ridge abyssal plain, sediment thickness contours from Géli et al. (2007) were used. The new regional sediment thickness grid was combined with NGDC's original ocean sediment thickness grid (Divins, 2003) to create an updated global grid of ocean sediment thickness. Even using the minimum estimates, sediment accumulations on the extended Australian and Antarctic continental margins are 2 km thicker across large regions and up to 9 km thicker in the Ceduna Basin compared to NGDC's original sediment thickness grid (Divins, 2003), which has been deprecated but is still available.

Authors and Institutions

Joanne M. Whittaker - EarthByte Research Group, School of Geosciences, The University of Sydney, Australia. ORCID: 0000-0002-3170-3935

Alexey Goncharov - Geoscience Australia, Canberra, ACT, Australia

R. Dietmar Müller - EarthByte Research Group, School of Geosciences, The University of Sydney, Australia. ORCID: 0000-0002-3334-5764

Simon E. Williams - EarthByte Research Group, School of Geosciences, The University of Sydney, Australia. ORCID: 0000-0003-4670-8883

German Leitchenkov - Research Institute for Geology and Mineral Resources of the World Ocean, St. Petersburg,Russia

Overview of Resources Contained

This collection contains the updated Total Sediment Thickness of the World's Oceans & Marginal Seas, Version 2 grid. The grid has been updated in the Australian-Antarctic region.

List of Resources

Note: For details on the files included in this data collection, see “Description_of_Resources.txt”.

Note: For information on file formats and what programs to use to interact with various file formats, see “File_Formats_and_Recommended_Programs.txt”.

• Global sediment thickness data (.nc, .txt, .tif, .kmz, .jpg, 257.2 MB)

Data in this collection is also available from ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/sedthick/index.html

For more information on this data collection, and links to other datasets from the EarthByte Research Group please visit EarthByte

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