Carbon, opal, and isotope concentration of ODP Leg 175 holes

One of the goals of Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) Leg 175 was to reconstruct the history of upwelling-induced biological productivity along the coast of Africa from the Congo River to the Cape of Good Hope. The amounts of inorganic and organic carbon that have accumulated in sediment are essential to this reconstruction, and these parameters were routinely measured during Leg 175 (Wefer, Berger, Richter, et al., 1998, doi:10.2973/odp.proc.ir.175.1998). We have augmented the shipboard data with carbon and opal measurements done on sediments from sites between 5°S and 25°S that represent different productivity regimes. Furthermore, we have determined the organic carbon stable isotope compositions of these same sediment samples.