The general goals of Leg 177 are two-fold: (1) to augment the biostratigraphic, biogeographic, and paleoceanographic history of the earlier Cenozoic, a period marked by the establishment of the Antarctic cryosphere and the ACC; and (2) to target expanded sections of late Neogene sediments that will resolve the timing of Southern Hemisphere climatic events on orbital and suborbital time scales, which can be compared with similar records from other ocean basins and with ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica. Drilling the proposed sites will provide the sedimentary sequences needed to address a number of first-order problems in southern high-latitude paleoclimatology and stratigraphy including (1) the evolution of the ACC and past changes in the position of the Polar Front Zone and the Antarctic sea-ice field; (2) the evolutionary history and stability of the Antarctic cryosphere; (3) changes in Southern Ocean productivity, nutrient cycling, and pCO2 and their role in global biogeochemical cycles; (4) changes in the mixing ratio of various deep and bottom water masses in the Antarctic (e.g., North Atlantic Deep Water); (5) the response of the Southern Ocean to orbital forcing and the phase relationships to climatic changes in the high-latitude Northern Hemisphere; and (6) correlation and comparison of marine sediment cores from the Southern Hemisphere with polar ice-core records and documentation of abrupt climate change on millennial time scales.