Grain-size distribution in surficial seafloor sediments of Eurasian Arctic seas

As surficial seafloor sediment grain size is one important explanatory variable used in these modelling studies, we compiled open-access information from 23 data sets on this environmental parameter, pooling validated grain-size data from a total of 2,134 sampling sites distributed across the Barents, Kara, Laptev and East Siberian Seas, as well as some abyssal regions of the central Arctic Ocean.

As grain-size distributions are differently scaled in western European and Russian sources, all data were uniformly transformed to the Udden-Wentworth scale using the "approximation" function in R prior to further processing and archiving. For this, a linear interpolation was utilized to split the 50-100 µm grain-size fraction used in Russian data sets into the silt (≤ 63 µm) and sand (> 63 µm) fraction of the Udden-Wentworth scale.