NSB: A NEW, EXPANDED AND IMPROVED DATABASE OF MARINE PLANKTONIC MICROFOSSIL DATA

Over 40 years of drilling has produced thousands of papers reporting the occurrences of thousands of species of planktonic microfossils in deep-sea sediments. These data are central to construction of age models for more than one thousand deep-sea sedimentary sections, as well as research in paleoceanography, biologic evolution and taxonomy/systematics. Because the majority of this research was published post-cruise, little of it has been captured in the official deep-sea drilling program databases. In the early 1990s the Neptune database was created at the ETH in Zürich to synthesize this data, making possible numerous published global studies of microfossil distributions through time, and, via the included age model library, global syntheses of other section data, e.g.sedimentologic and geochemical data for paleoceanography. The Neptune database was upgraded by the Chronos project (NSF, Ames, Iowa) and first brought online in the early 2000s but became orphaned and unstable soon after as funding ended. With funding support from CEES, Olso and the ESF/Earthime-EU a new version of Neptune has now been created: Neptune Sandbox Berlin (NSB). Data content has been upgraded from ca 500k to nearly 800k occurrence records, including most of the important newer ODP and IODP sections. The taxonomy has been overhauled, based on IODP's recent Taxonomic Name List (TNL) project. Data has been scanned and flagged for errors and outliers. The ages have been updated to the Gradstein et al. 2012 scale. Important new data types haven been added, particularly the >27k stratigraphic events used to create age models for most holes, together with nearly 2k event definitions. Lastly, a website has been built to allow common data searches and downloads (www.nsb-mfn-berlin.de). It is hoped that NSB will provide an improved platform for future research in marine micropaleontology and paleoceanography.