Annual growth of Laternula elliptica shells from Dumont d'Urville Station (Adélie Land, East Antarctica)

Laternula elliptica is one of the largest bivalve mollusk in Antarctic waters. Its shell presents annual growth increments that can be crossdated for the construction of master chronologies. Inter-annual variations of the resulting growth indices are driven by environmental forcings, among which sea ice and sympagic algae dynamics are the main ones. These two datasets present shell growth data collected in cross-sections of chondrophores (hinge area) of 27 Laternula elliptica specimens harvested by SCUBA diving near Dumont d'Urville Station (Adélie Land, East Antarctica) in January 2016. A calendar year was assigned to each annual growth increment by visual crossdating backward from the sampling year. Growth increment widths, expressed in micrometers, were measured from the last deposited growth increment (margin) toward earlier growth years (raw increment width µm file). Each individual time-series of growth increment width was first power-transformed, then detrended with a negative exponential function to compute two time-series of annual growth indices, with or without prewhitening by fitting an autoregressive model (growth indices file).