Using the Neptune Database to Explore Mesozoic-Cenozoic Chronostratigraphy and the Deep Sea Microfossil Record

R. Mark Leckie¹, Cinzia Cervato², Kendra Clark¹, Patrick Diver³, Douglas Fils², and Brian Huber^4
1 University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA
² Iowa State University - CHRONOS, Ames, IA
³ DivDat Consulting, Wesley
⁴ Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

For 35 years, the Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) and the Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) retrieved sediment cores from throughout the world's oceans, but access to age and species distribution data from those cores has been largely dependent on searches through hard copy publications. The relational chronostratigraphic database, Neptune, provides a major advance to accessing these data for select sites with high-quality micropaleontologic data. Originally developed in the early 1990's at the ETH Zurich (Lazarus et al., 1995 - http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/geology/lazarus.html; Spencer-Cervato, 1999 - http://palaeo-electronica.org/1999_2/neptune/issue2_99.htm), Neptune has become CHRONOS's time-calibrated data engine for marine plankton data. It is accessible on-line (http://services.chronos.org/databases/neptune/index.html) and can be used for studies of chronostratigraphy, evolution, paleobiogeography, and paleoceanography. The established chronology can also be used to obtain age control for sedimentological and geochemical data.

Sites included in Neptune are selected on the basis of the availability of well-documented microfossil range data (calcareous nannoplankton, foraminifera, diatoms, and radiolarians) generated by post-cruise research. The database is searchable and data can be exported to produce age range charts, geographic distribution maps, and occurrence charts. At present, Neptune contains the occurrences of about 8800 plankton species names in Cenozoic samples of 251 DSDP and ODP drill holes from all ocean basins up through ODP Leg 210, the last expedition of the ODP (2003), as well as 37 Mesozoic sites. Neptune is also integrated with a cross-platform graphic correlation tool for age vs. depth plotting (ADP - http://services.chronos.org/webservices/adp/index.html).