An open access platform to document and retrieve composite records from ocean drilling sites - the Ocean Drilling Composite Tracker (ODCT)

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A key concept in scientific ocean drilling in order to recover continuous multi-million year spanning successions from the sea floor is the formation of composite records. Drilling multiple holes at a given site and the subsequent assemblage of an undisturbed and complete sediment sequence allows scientist to retrieve outstanding, several hundreds of meters thick records for paleoclimate reconstructions. Fifty years of ocean drilling clearly revealed that a single drilled hole is not adequate to be able to resolve the progression of climate change needed to identify causal mechanism. The composite records from multiple drilled holes have become the backbone of paleoceanographic research to better understand Earth past climate changes. Typically during a two month-long ODP/IODP Expedition targeting to retrieve full sediment successions from the sea floor a composite is formed routinely onboard by the Stratigraphic Correlator. The quality of the composite record depends mainly on the careful correlation of prominent features in the core, which in turn depends on the quality of the data used for correlation. In addition, to evaluate, verify and improve shipboard composite records other more time consuming techniques with higher signal-to-noise-ratio help to substantially revised composite records, and sometime reveal major gaps or repeated interval in composite records. Thus, years after an expedition checks and revisions can result in an iteratively evolving composite with multiple published versions. The main goal of the planned project is to develop an open access and cross-platform software tool to document and track all of the published and future composite records of scientific ocean drilling core sites, the Ocean Drilling Composite Tracker. Scientist can use this tool to generate sample lists with sample identification as well as composite depth and vice versa for different composite versions, retrieve alternative sample locations in parallel sections that are not part of the composite record, extract data according to the composite from the drill core database, and retrieve ages for the samples or data using published age models. This tool is one step towards applying machine-aided data analysis and extraction.