Physical properties of marine sediments

Abstract

Abstract : The unconsolidated sediments that blanket the ocean floor are of widely varying thickness but seismic observations indicate that 200 to 400 meters in the Pacific and one kilometer in the Atlantic are fairly typical values for deep water. At present direct observation of these sediments is limited to such samples as may be recovered by dredging or coring operations, for drilling has been carried out only in the shallow waters of the coastal shelves. Knowledge of the physical properties of the great bulk of the sediments deeper than the few tens of feet reached by coring equipment is thus necessarily derived from geophysical observations.