Archive of Chirp Subbottom Profile Data Collected in 2016 from the Northern Chandeleur Islands, Louisiana

All Chirp systems use a signal of continuously varying frequency; the system used during this survey produces high-resolution, shallow-penetration (typically less than 75-milliseconds [ms]) profile images of sub-seafloor stratigraphy. The towfish contains a transducer that transmits and receives acoustic energy and is typically towed 1–2 meters (m) below the sea's surface. As transmitted acoustic energy intersects density boundaries, such as the seafloor or sub-surface sediment layers, energy is reflected toward the transducer, received, and recorded by a PC-based seismic acquisition system. This process is repeated at regular intervals (for example, 0.125 seconds [s]) and returned energy is recorded for a specific duration (for example, 50 ms). In this way, a two-dimensional (2D) vertical image of the shallow geologic structure beneath the towfish is produced. The seismic source utilized during field activity 2016-335-FA consisted of an EdgeTech SB-424 towfish running Discover version 4.09 acquisition software and towed on the port side of the R/V Sallenger, approximately 3.6 m opposite the global positioning system (GPS) reference point. The data were acquired using a frequency sweep of 4–20 kilohertz (kHz), a 43 kHz sample frequency, and recording length was approximately 242 ms. Based on survey speeds of 3.5 knots, the shot spacing was approximately 0.450 m. The binary portion of the unprocessed seismic data is stored in SEG Y rev. 0, IBM float format, which is a standard digital format that can be read and manipulated by most seismic processing software packages; the first 3,200 bytes of the file header are in American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) format instead of Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC) format. The SEG Y formatted trace files have a .sgy extension and may be downloaded and processed with commercial or public domain software such as Seismic Unix (SU) (Cohen and Stockwell, 2010). The printable profiles provided are chirp subbottom profile images that were processed using SU software. Survey Field Activity Collection System (FACS) and geophysical logs are also provided as supplemental information in the download file, 2016-335-FA_logs.zip.