Prydz Bay lies at the mouth of the Amery Ice Shelf-Lambert Glacier System and drains ~20% of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (Fig. F1). The continental shelf there contains a record of early Cenozoic and late Neogene glaciation. Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) Legs 119 and 188 drilled at five sites on the Prydz Bay continental shelf to study the proximal Cenozoic record of Antarctic glaciation (Barron, Larsen, et al., 1989, 1991; O'Brien, Cooper, Richter, et al., 2001) (Fig. F1). The Leg 119 drill sites (Sites 739-742) lie along a cross-shelf transect that was traversed by a composite seismic reflection profile recorded to assist correlation of geologic sections at the drill sites (Fig. F2) (Cooper et al., 1991a). Site 1166, drilled during Leg 188, was sited ~40 km from the Leg 119 transect to sample an older Cenozoic section, but was not located on a seismic line that could be directly tied to the Leg 119 sites. The only correlation possible between Sites 742 and 1166 at the time of drilling was for the late Neogene section and was based on similar glacial lithologies and similar shapes in resistivity and velocity profiles from downhole logging (Shipboard Scientific Party, 2001).
This paper presents a new high-resolution seismic reflection profile, Palmer line 01-1-04, which crosses Sites 1166 (Leg 188) and 742 (Leg 119), to correlate stratigraphic units between the drill sites. The profile is shown at both page size and foldout size (Fig. F3). We use the downhole logging information and seismic-source signatures to create synthetic seismic traces at the two drill sites. The synthetic traces are used to link the drill core information to the new seismic profile and thereby to regional geologic models. Our new integrated seismic and drilling results more clearly define regional subsurface geometries of acoustic units near and between the drill sites, and establish a tie between the seismic and lithostratigraphic units at the drill sites.