The offshore New Harbour project: Deciphering the middle Mio
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TitleThe offshore New Harbour project: Deciphering the middle Miocene through late Eocene seismic stratigraphy of offshore New Harbour, western Ross Sea, AntarcticaAbstractIn the Austral spring of 2008, over 48 km of multi-channel seismic data were collected offshore of New Harbour, which is located in the western most Ross Sea, Antarctica. This project is part of the ANDRILL (Antarctic Geological Drilling) ProgrammeÅ› Offshore New Harbour Project, with its aim to investigate the stratigraphic and tectonic history of the inner shelf of southern McMurdo Sound. Correlating the seismic data to CIROS-1 and ANDRILL AND-2A drillholes provided age dates ranging from Late Miocene to at least Late Eocene for the reflectors and lithological descriptions for the seismic units. This permitted development of a glacial history of this area, resulting in dividing the seismic data into three units: an Upper Eocene-Lower Oligocene unit; an Upper Oligocene-Lower Miocene unit; and a Middle Miocene and younger unit. The seismic section below 700 mbsf has two possible interpretations: (1) substantial Eocene strata are present downdip of CIROS-1, which would represent a potential future-drilling objective for the ANDRILL Programme; or (2) these reflectors may be equivalent to Devonian strata recovered at the Cape Roberts 3 as the two-way traveltime of Eocene and Devonian strata are nearly identical, making it difficult to discriminate between them in seismic data. Copyright The Geological Society of London 2013.AcknowledgementsWe wish to thank the editor, Michael Hambrey for his encouragement and excellent feedback as well as P. Barker, S. Henrys and one anonymous reviewer for their extremely insightful and thoughtful comments in reviewing an earlier version of this manuscript, which greatly improved this paper. This research was supported by National Science Foundation grants ANT-0732796 and ANT-0732875 to S. F. Pekar and M. A. Speece, respectively. G. Wilson and K. Tinto were supported by the New Zealand Foundation for Research, Science & Technology Contract CO5X0410. G. Wilson also acknowledges logistical support from Antarctica New Zealand. A special thanks goes to S. Alesandrini and R. Hein of Raytheon Polar Services Company for their help designing and building the Offshore New Harbour air-gun system, and the entire Offshore New Harbour crew and the support personnel at McMurdo Station for field support.
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1st AuthorPekar, S.AuthorPekar, S.Speece, M.Wilson, D.Sunwall, D.Tinto, K.Year2013JournalGeological Society Special PublicationVolume381Number1Pages199-213DOI10.1144/SP381.2URLhttps://www.scopus.com/inward/recor.....5ffbe1bdd9fc8a7038dc0f5dbKeywordsEocene-Oligocene boundarygeological recordinner corelithostratigraphyMiocenepaleoseismicityseismic dataseismic stratigraphytectonic structurecorrelationEoceneglacial historylithology, AntarcticaCanadaNew HarbourNova ScotiaRoss SeaSouthern Ocean, rank5
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TypeArticleCitationPekar, S., Speece, M., Wilson, D., Sunwall, D. and Tinto, K. (2013) The offshore New Harbour project: Deciphering the middle Miocene through late Eocene seismic stratigraphy of offshore New Harbour, western Ross Sea, Antarctica. Geological Society Special Publication, 381(1): 199-213 doi:10.1144/SP381.2 IdentifierPekar2013Relevancerank5
Tinto, K., The offshore New Harbour project: Deciphering the middle Mio , [Pekar2013]. Antarctica NZ, accessed 12/02/2025, https://adam.antarcticanz.govt.nz/nodes/view/63716, 10.1144/SP381.2