The goal during Ocean Drilling Program Leg 184 was to reconstruct the long-term paleoenvironmental variability of the South China Sea (SCS) and the adjacent Asian continent. In the paleoceanographic proxies, the amounts of inorganic and organic carbon that have accumulated in sediment are fundamental measurements of paleoproductivity (e.g., Meyers, 1997). These proxy indicators are mainly controlled by surface water productivity and/or sediment preservation. In this report, we augmented shipboard data with coarse-fraction contents (weight percentage of particles >63 µm) from Sites 1143 and 1146. In addition, we compared the data from these two sites to determine the differences in paleoenvironment between the southern and northern parts of the SCS.
Site 1143 (9°21.72´N, 113°17.11´E; water depth = 2772 m), located within the Nansha area on the southern margin of the SCS, records the depositional history of 9 m.y. Site 1146 (19°27.40´N, 116°16.37´E; water depth = 2092 m) on the mid-continental slope in the northern part of the SCS documents a time interval of 18 m.y. Both sites lie above the modern lysocline (~3000 m). Sediment and squeeze cake samples were collected at a frequency of one per section from three advanced piston corer/extended core barrel holes at the two sites (Table T1).
1Wang, L.-W., and Lin, H.-L., 2004. Data report: Carbonate and organic carbon contents of sediments from Sites 1143 and 1146 in the South China Sea. In Prell, W.L., Wang, P., Blum, P., Rea, D.K., and Clemens, S.C. (Eds.), Proc. ODP, Sci. Results, 184 [Online]. Available from World Wide Web: <http://www-odp.tamu.edu/publications/184_SR/207/207.htm>. [Cited YYYY-MM-DD]
2Institute of Marine Geology and Chemistry, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan 804. Correspondence author: hllin@mail.nsysu.edu.tw
Initial receipt: 8 October 2001
Acceptance: 12 December 2003
Web publication:
8 March 2004
Ms 184SR-207