Data report: X-ray fluorescence core scanning and revised composite section of Pliocene–Pleistocene sediments from IODP Expedition 397 Site U1587

During International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) Expedition 397, four sites (U1586, U1587, U1385, and U1588) were drilled on a bathymetric transect across a submarine plateau on the Portuguese continental slope to intersect each major subsurface water mass of the eastern North Atlantic.Site U1587 (37°34.867′N,10°21.531′W;water depth = 3479 m), the second deepest site along the depth transect and the second most distal from the coastline, was cored for reconstructing changes in physical and chemical properties of the deep eastern North Atlantic on short and long timescales.At this site, coring in three holes recovered 1566 m of sediment from which a continuous 595 m composite sequence of late Miocene to Holocene sediments was developed.The dominant lithologies are nannofossil ooze and clay in varying proportions that were accumulated at an average rate of 10 cm/ky.The high sedimentation rates and expanded section will permit the development of proxy records for high-resolution climate reconstruction spanning the past 7.8 My.Following Expedition 397, the archive halves of the cores used to develop the shipboard composite depth scale of Site U1587 were analyzed using an Avaatech X-ray fluorescence (XRF) core scanner in the Gulf Coast Repository at Texas A&M University (USA) to obtain semiquantitative chemical elemental data at 1 cm resolution.In this report, we present the measured elemental records and the refined composite depth scale (splice) for the Pliocene and Quaternary sections at the site and provide a regression equation for estimating CaCO 3 weight percent by using the log(Ca/Ti) values.C.A. Alvarez Zarikian et al. • Data report: X-ray fluorescence core scanning and revised composite section