Town of Norfolk, MA GIS Viewer

April 2022

This data set contains the sea floor topographic contours, sun-illuminated topographic imagery, and backscatter intensity generated from a multibeam sonar survey of the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary region off Boston, Massachusetts, an area of approximately 1100 square nautical miles. The Stellwagen Bank NMS Mapping Project is designed to provide detailed maps of the Stellwagen Bank region's environments and habitats and the first complete multibeam topographic and sea floor characterization maps of a significant region of the shallow EEZ. Data were collected on four cruises over a two year period from the fall of 1994 to the fall of 1996. The surveys were conducted aboard the Candian Hydrographic Service vessel Frederick G. Creed, a SWATH (Small Waterplane Twin Hull) ship that surveys at speeds of 16 knots. The multibeam data were collected utilizing a Simrad Subsea EM 1000 Multibeam Echo Sounder (95 kHz) that is permanently installed in the hull of the Creed.

This sediment database contains location, description, and texture of samples taken by numerous marine sampling programs. Most of the samples are from the Atlantic Continental Margin of the United States, but some are from as diverse locations as Lake Baikal, Russia, the Hawaiian Islands region, Puerto Rico, the Gulf of Mexico, and Lake Michigan. The database presently contains data for over 27,000 samples, which includes texture data for approximately 3800 samples taken or analyzed by the Atlantic Continental Margin Program (ACMP), a joint U.S. Geological Survey/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution project conducted from 1962 to 1970. As part of the ACMP, some historical data from samples collected between 1955 and 1962 were also incorporated into the dataset.