Scanning the Ocean’s sedimentary barcode: optimising digital archives towards a deeper understanding of Earth Climate

Scientific ocean drilling (SOD) has played an important role in revealing much about Earth’s climate history through 50+ years of international programmes such as the International Ocean Discovery Programme (IODP) and its predecessors. The sedimentary records retrieved from below the ocean floor captures the evolution of Earth’s oceans and climate system, documenting both rapid climate change and long-term trends spanning at least the last 145 million years to the emergence of our modern world. All this was accomplished with a relatively traditional set of ocean drilling tools and approaches. Now with technological advances and the advent of data science, SOD is in a unique position to make similarly fundamental advances at a time when decision-makers are grappling with the effects of unprecedented rapid climate change.

Given the present need to understand the processes and capture the consequences of our changing climate, we need to employ all possible tools to achieve this. Here we present what ocean drilling material is available through geological time, summarised in easily accessible databases utilising Code for Ocean Drilling Data (CODD; www.CODD-home.net; Wilkens et al., 2017). We also highlight approaches to optimise the use of legacy SOD material and data by targeting locations with  stratigraphic continuity (e.g., locations with composite splices) combined with advances in digital capabilities, such as CODD. This includes presenting an archive of CODD core image tracks for all sites with continuous sedimentary sections based on composite splices. Together, we aim to highlight how this information can be used to develop a multifaceted approach further utilising digital archives derived from scientific ocean drilling material to read the subsurface barcode of past climate change stored in our deep-sea sediments.