Antarctica Oceanology II: The Australian-New Zealand Sector

Published by the American Geophysical Union as part of the Antarctic Research Series.

The organization and production of Antarctic Oceanology II: The Australian-New Zealand Sector were motivated with several considerations in mind. It is obvious that the value of any scientific contribution treating a particular geographical area is greatly enhanced when the individual work is compiled and presented with other contributions that consider the scientific problems of the same area from different approaches. There is no doubt that the potential value of a collective volume far exceeds that of any individual contributions. Thus this geographical approach, which has been successfully used in many books, has also been used in this volume of the Antarctic Research Series. Moreover, the contributions in this volume have benefited from one important and basically different starting point, the research program of the USNS Eltanin. A large portion of marine geologic, marine geophysical, and oceanographic data for this sector of the ocean south of Australia and New Zealand has been collected simultaneously aboard the Eltanin, the antarctic research vessel of the National Science Foundation. Most of the Eltanin cruises spanning the period of the last 2-3 years have been devoted to reconnaissance surveying of this area. The surveys have been multidisciplinary by design, and the ship tracks have been systematically laid out as part of an over-all plan to survey the entire circumpolar ocean surrounding the antarctic continent