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The extending Ocean Drilling Pursuits (eODP) Project: Synthesizing Scientific Ocean Drilling Data
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  • Jocelyn Sessa,
  • Andrew J. Fraass,
  • Leah J. LeVay,
  • Shanan E Peters,
  • Katie Marie Jamson
Jocelyn Sessa
Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Andrew J. Fraass
University of Victoria
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Leah J. LeVay
International Ocean Discovery Program, Texas A&M University
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Shanan E Peters
University of Wisconsin-Madison
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Katie Marie Jamson
University of Victoria
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Abstract

For over fifty years, cores recovered from ocean basins have generated extensive fossil, lithologic, and chemical archives that have revolutionized the fields of plate tectonics and oceanography, and significantly improved our understanding of climate change. Although scientific ocean drilling (SOD) data are openly available after each expedition, formats for these data are heterogeneous. Furthermore, lithological, chronological, and paleobiological data are typically separated into different repositories, limiting researchers’ abilities to discover and analyze integrated SOD data sets. Emphasis within Earth Sciences on adhering to FAIR Data Principles and the establishment of community-lead databases provide a pathway to unite SOD data and further harness the scientific potential of the investments made in offshore drilling. Here, we describe a workflow for compiling, cleaning, and standardizing key SOD records, and importing them into the Paleobiology Database (PBDB) and Macrostrat, systems with versatile, open data distribution mechanisms. These efforts are being carried out by the extending Ocean Drilling Pursuits (eODP) project. eODP has processed all of the lithological, chronological, and paleobiological data from one SOD repository, along with numerous other datasets that were never deposited in a database; these were manually transcribed from original reports. This compiled dataset contains over 78,000 lithological units from 1,048 drilling holes from 390 sites. Over 26,000 fossil-bearing samples, with 5,280 taxonomic entries from 13 biological groups, are placed within this lithologic spatiotemporal framework. Information is available via the PBDB and Macrostrat application programming interfaces, which render data retrievable by a variety of parameters, including age, taxon, site, and lithology.