The recently completed Healy-Oden Trans- Arctic Expedition 2005 (HoTrAX’05) retrieved

29 piston cores averaging nearly 12 meters in length from a complete transect across the central Arctic ocean (Figure 1).These cores provide a critically-needed sample cache for both a pan-Arctic stratigraphy and a long-awaited paleoclimate record that it is hoped will greatly improve the understanding of how deepwater is exchanged between Arctic basins, how the climate system in the Arctic works over longer time intervals, and how the Arctic system interacts with global systems. The coring was done from the U.s. Coast Guard Cutter (UsCGC) Healy, while oceano-graphic measurements were made from the swedish icebreaker Oden