IODP Canterbury Basin Expedition

This grant application is for travel and time costs for an IODP expedition to the Canterbury Basin. The objectives during the time on board include describing and logging the core, performing stratigraphic correlations of the various wells drilled, biostratigraphy, sampling, measurement of physical properties and so on. After the cruise is over, the data gathered will be used in further research into the reasons why the sediment packages on the Canterbury Basin margin are shaped as they are. This will involve more detailed examination of the samples, logs and microfossils, as well as further analysis of samples and comparison with published examples. The idea is to increase our understanding of how these bodies of sediment form, so that we can predict how they might appear in the subsurface, as well as finding out more about how climate and sea-level conditions have changed in the past, which will help to predict how they might have changed in the future.