Abstract This award supports two principal investigations that utilize the recently completed Antarctic Marine Geological and Geophysical synthesis and the associated digital bathymetric, sediment thickness, and crustal structure data files. These, used along with published digital crustal age data and spreading rate data for the circum-polar region will allow development of paleographic reconstructions, complete with paleobathymetry for a variety of geologic times from the mid-Cretaceous to the present. The crustal age and spreading rate data files are needed both to unload the sediments and reposition the depths to account for the effects of accrued crustal subsidence due to cooling and isostasy. An important benefit of determining the most plausible paleobathymetry will be to arm circulation and climate modellers with constraints necessary to refine their models and to further evaluate the sensitivity of such models to submarine morphological barriers and changing basin sizes. The second proposed application of the digital age and spreading rate files is to test hypotheses that selected oceanic crustal parameters of layer velocities and thicknesses, as well as small-scale seafloor roughness, are age and/or spreading rate dependent. Establishing such relationships is likely to lead to new discoveries about the underlying casual processes effecting crustal evolution. The Southern Ocean Marine Geological and Geophysical Atlas and other digital data provide an excellent opportunity to test such hypotheses for a significantly large fraction of the World Ocean.
