The Woodlark Basin is a young marginal basin in the southwest Pacific that split the orogenically thickened continental crust of southeast Papua (Taylor et al., 1995) (Fig. F1). Seafloor spreading magnetic anomalies record the creation of oceanic lithosphere since 6 Ma and its propagation westward to Moresby Seamount at present day (Goodliffe, 1998; Taylor et al., 1999). During Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) Leg 180, we drilled 10 sites ahead of the present spreading tip at 151°39´E (Fig. F1) with the goals of characterizing the rift-related subsidence and penetrating the shear zone of a major low-angle fault dipping north from Moresby Seamount (Taylor et al., 1995; Mutter et al., 1996; Abers et al., 1997). Although the latter goal was not fully realized (Shipboard Scientific Party, 1999a), cores recovered from the northern margin (Sites 1118, 1109, and 1115, from south to north) and Moresby Seamount (Sites 1114 and 1116) record the subsidence of the basin since the onset of rifting at ~8 Ma. Cores recovered from the lower section of Site 1115 also record the prerift forearc basin history. This study uses synthetic seismograms to correlate borehole data from Sites 1118, 1109, and 1115 on the northern margin to high-quality multichannel seismic (MCS) data (Goodliffe et al., 1999). This allows the high-resolution subsidence history, from a coastal fluvial environment to the modern-day bathyal depths, to be defined along a crosshole-correlated transect across the margin.