As part of a site survey for a proposed IODP program to drill marine sediments associated with late Cenozoic climate change and tectonic activity along the southern Alaskan margin, the researchers will combine efforts with an already funded piston coring and shallow imaging cruise and will acquire additional piston cores and high-resolution seismic images at proposed Gulf of Alaska drill sites. This region is believed to be analogous to, but have a smaller influence than, the Tibetan plateau in terms of the possible feedback between climate change and tectonics. The coring program has been designed to provide temporal resolution at sub-decadal to millennial time scales and sufficient spatial resolution to capture some of the variability in the provenance of marine sediments derived from glaciated source areas. The researchers will use the recovered core material to constrain the timing of deposition, sediment mixing rates, sediment fluxes, and sediment sources, to infer glacial dynamics, and to characterize basic visual and physical properties. In collaboration with Oregon State University colleagues, they will obtain additional information about paleotemperature, salinity, and oxygen conditions. The researchers will also process the marine seismic data for use in sequence stratigraphic correlations and baseline characterization of the proposed IODP drill sites.
