USING THE NEPTUNE DATABASE TO EXPLORE MESOZOIC-CENOZOIC CHRONOSTRATIGRAPHY AND THE DEEP SEA MICROFOSSIL RECORD

For 35 years, the Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) and the Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) have retrieved sediment cores from throughout the world’s oceans, but access to age and species distribution data from those cores have 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, 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 evolution, paleobiogeography, and paleoceanography.

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 165 DSDP and ODP drill holes from all ocean basins up to ODP Leg 135. The database is currently being updated at the University of Massachusetts with additional ODP sites up to Leg 210, the last expedition of the ODP (2003), and inclusion of Mesozoic data from both DSDP and ODP. 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).

Most of the data in Neptune are contained in four basic data tables: 1. Planktonic microfossil data (individual microfossil records in individual samples, based on range-charts in DSDP Initial Reports and ODP Scientific Results); 2. Taxonomy (species names with synonymies); 3. Age models (age assignment for each sample); 4. Biogeography (all species names reported). We seek additional published microfossil distributional data from DSDP and ODP sites to include in the Neptune database; please contact Mark Leckie (mleckie@geo.umass.edu) if you are interested in submitting your data.