During Leg 177 of the Ocean Drilling Program, an expanded sequence of Pliocene to Holocene calcareous muds was recovered at Site 1089 on a drift deposit in the southern Cape Basin (Gersonde, Hodell, Blum et al., 1999). The reconstruction of detrital sources and modes of sediment transport in relation to regional current systems and climate variability over the last 590 k.y. were studied from sedimentological and mineralogical parameters of the terrigenous sediment fraction. The results of this study are published in Kuhn and Diekmann (2002), and the analytical data are compiled in Tables T1 and T2.
Another important goal of Leg 177 was to explore the nature of the mid-Pleistocene climate transition (MPT) on the Southern Hemisphere. At Site 1090 a 44-m-thick suitable MPT record of Quaternary diatom-bearing foraminiferal muds and oozes was recovered on the Agulhas Ridge. As shown in Diekmann and Kuhn (2002), environmental responses to the MPT comprised changes in terrestrial climate, biological productivity, and regional ocean circulation, as inferred from compositional sediment data and clay mineralogy (Tables T3, T4).