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Thirty million year deep sea records in the South China Sea

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Chinese Science Bulletin

Abstract

In the spring of 1999 the Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) Leg 184 Shipboard Party cored 17 holes at 6 deep water sites in the northern and southern parts of the South China Sea (SCS). Chinese scientists actively participated in the entire process of this first deep-sea drilling leg off China, from proposal to post-cruise studies. More than 30 categories of analyses have been conducted post-cruise in various Chinese laboratories on a large number of core samples, and the total number of analyses exceeded 60 thousand. The major scientific achievements of the Leg 184 studies are briefly reported in three successive papers, with the first one presented here dealing with deep-sea stratigraphy and evolution of climate cycles. This ODP leg has established the best deep-sea stratigraphic sequences in the Western Pacific: the 23-Ma isotope sequence from the Dong-Sha area is unique worldwide because of its continuity; the last 5-Ma sequence from the Nansha area represents one of the best 4 ODP sites worldwide with the highest time-resolution for that time interval, and the sequences of physical properties enable a decadal-scale time resolution. All these together have provided for the first time high-quality marine records for paleoenvironmental studies in the Asian-Pacific region. This new set of stratigraphic records has revealed changes in climate cyclicity over the last 20 Ma with the fluctuating power of the 100 ka, 400 ka, 2000 ka eccentricity cycles, indicating the evolving response of the climate system to orbital forcing along with the growth of the Antarctic and Northern Hemisphere ice sheets.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Marine Geology, Ministry of Education, Tongji University, 200092, Shanghai, China

    Pinxian Wang, Quanhong Zhao, Zhimin Jian, Xinrong Cheng, Wei Huang, Jun Tian, Jiliang Wang & Qianyu Li

  2. Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 210008, Nanjing, China

    Baohua Li

  3. Geoscience University of China, 100083, Beijing, China

    Xin Su

Authors
  1. Pinxian Wang
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  2. Quanhong Zhao
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  3. Zhimin Jian
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  4. Xinrong Cheng
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  5. Wei Huang
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  6. Jun Tian
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  7. Jiliang Wang
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  9. Baohua Li
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  10. Xin Su
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Wang, P., Zhao, Q., Jian, Z. et al. Thirty million year deep sea records in the South China Sea. Chin.Sci.Bull. 48, 2524–2535 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03037016

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03037016

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