The Kuroshio (Black) Current is the biggest western boundary surface current in the western Pacific. Because of its high speed, great depth and width, and high temperature, it plays an important role in the meridional transport of heat, mass, momentum, and moisture from the western Pacific warm pool to high latitudes in the north Pacific. Although its role in the Pacific is as important as that of the Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic, almost nothing has been learned about its evolution during the past 32 yr of drilling by the Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) and the Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) because there are almost no locations beneath the Kuroshio Current where a deep-sea sedimentary section with high sedimentation rates can contain well-preserved calcareous microfossils. The Southern Okinawa Trough is currently an area of high sedimentation because of the enormous terrigenous sediment supply from the East China shelf and the island of Taiwan. Modern sediments in this area consist mainly of clay- to silt-sized terrigenous sediments with a moderate (~20%) biogenic carbonate content. Site 1202 was proposed on the southern slope of the Okinawa Trough to obtain a high-resolution record of the history of the Kuroshio Current during the Quaternary.
Four holes were cored with the advanced hydraulic piston corer/extended core barrel (APC/XCB) at Site 1202, the deepest to a total depth of 410 meters below seafloor (mbsf). Logging efforts had to be abandoned because of strong drill pipe vibrations caused by strong currents at the site (occasionally >4.5 kt).
Because Site 1202 was drilled only a few hours out of port at the end of the leg, only minimal shipboard analysis, consisting of multisensor track (MST) and paleomagnetic studies on whole-round samples, preliminary dating of core catcher samples, sedimentological descriptions of split core from Hole 1202A, and whole-round sampling for shore-based geochemical studies was performed during Leg 195. Detailed descriptions of the core were prepared by a shore-based party assembled for the purpose at the ODP Gulf Coast Core Repository in College Station, Texas. The entire 410-m section recovered at Site 1202 consists of rapidly deposited dark gray calcareous silty clay and sandy turbidites. The oldest microfossils observed were <127 ka in age, making the sedimentation rate at least 325 cm/k.y.
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2Shipboard Scientific Party addresses can be found under "Shipboard Scientific Party" in the preliminary pages of the volume.
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