The IPOD Geological/Geophysical Data Bank

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ABSTRACT The IPOD Data Bank has served the JOIDES community since 1975 by finding and collating existing marine geological/geophysical data in the vicinity of prospective IPOD drill sites or transects of sites, archiving all data collected under the auspices of the IPOD Site Survey program, providing folios of data to the designed co-chief scientists on D/V GLOMAR CHALLENGER (and on request to the various JOIDES subject panels), and supporting the JOIDES and DSDP Safety Panels by providing data packets to its members. At the Data Bank, U.S. institutional site survey data is stored digitally in NGSCD "mergedmerged" format and is available either in the form of a magnetic tape or a computer plot of annotated geophysical (bathymetry, magnetics, and gravity) values along track. In addition, seismic profiles collected during the surveys are also archived. Contour maps, heat flow charts, bottom photographs, and other forms of data presentation compiled in the course of the production of a cruise report are also often archived. INTRODUCTION By the early 1960s, scientists at the major oceanographic institutions recognized that substantial advances in marine geoscience were within grasp. Up to that point, the only sampling of the deep-sea floor was in the form of dredge hauls and cores. Though these contributed greatly to our understanding of the geological history of the ocean floor, these methods only provided data from the upper 20 m of the ocean floor. The need to penetrate deeper stratigraphic sections (and later into the ocean crust) was obvious. Four of the major institutions - Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory of Columbia University (L-DGO), Scripps Institution of Oceanography of the University of California at San Diego (SIO), Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), and Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science of the University of Miami (RSMAS) - decided to work together in developing a unified program of deep sediment coring. In 1964, these institutions signed a memorandum of agreement and inaugurated the Joint Oceanographic Institutions for Deep Earth Sampling JOIDES. The initial effort of JOIDES was managed by L-DGO under the sponsorship of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and drilled several deep holes on the continental margin off northern Florida in the region of Blake Plateau. The drilling vessel was M/V CALDRILL I, a converted 54 meter AKL-type navy vessel equipped for rotary drilling. l The success of this effort provided the impetus and framework for a more ambitious drilling program. Under the sponsorship of NSF, SIO was designated the operating institution for what became known as the Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) and a world-wide drilling program commenced in 1968. The operating vessel was D/V GLOMAR CHALLENGER; this arrangement is still in existence today.