Cores are visually inspected and described aboard the recovery ship. 

 After delivery to CERC, the cores are sampled at close intervals by dril- 

 ling through the liners and removing parts of representative material. 

 After preliminary analysis, a number of representative cores are split 

 longitudinally to show details of the bedding and changes in stratigraphy. 

 Cores are split using a wooden trough arrangement fabricated at CERC shop 

 facilities. A circular powersaw mounted on a base which is designed to 

 ride along the top of the trough is adjusted to cut through the plastic 

 liner and not disturb the core sediment. By making a second longitudinal 

 cut in the opposite direction, a 120° segment of the liner is cut and can 

 be removed. The sediment above the cut is then scraped away to remove 

 altered and disturbed sediment, and the core is carefully logged, sampled 

 at closer intervals, photographed, and resealed. 



Samples from the cores are then examined under a plane light binocular 

 microscope and described in terms of gross lithology, color, mineralogy, 

 and the type and abundance of skeletal fragments of marine organisms. 

 Granulometric parameters (e.g., mean size, sorting) for many of the samples 

 are also obtained by using the CERC Rapid Sand Analyzer (RSA) which is 

 analogous to that described by Zeigler, Whitney, and Hays (1960) and 

 Schlee (1966). 



3. Scope . 



The primary (main grid) area covered by this report includes the part 

 of Massachusetts Bay lying generally westward of Stellwagen Basin and 

 between lines drawn eastward from Lynn on the north and North Cohasset 

 on the south (Fig. 1) . Secondary reconnaissance areas to the north and 

 south are also included to the extent warranted by available data (Fig. 1) . 

 These areas encompass a narrow inshore strip extending from the primary 

 survey area north to Cape Ann and south to Duxbury Beach. 



Basic ICONS survey data consist of 242 statute miles (186 grid, 56 

 reconnaissance of seismic reflection profiles and 43 sediment cores. 

 Locations of tracklines and coring sites are shown in Figure 2. Addi- 

 tional data were obtained from large-scale hydrographic smooth sheets, and 

 from pertinent scientific and technical literature, particularly a report 

 by the Massachusetts Coastal Mineral Inventory (MCMl) survey (Willett, 1972) 



Although the customary seismic reflection gridline spacing of 1 statute 

 mile and core density used for ICONS studies has proven adequate for fairly 

 detailed analysis of areas off the mid-Atlantic and southeast coasts of 

 the United States, data density to a similar degree in this complex region 

 is not sufficient for detailed treatment. Consequently, this study is 

 more limited in scope and detail than previous ICONS reports covering 

 Atlantic inner shelf areas to the south. 



4. Recent Studies . 



Several recent studies of surface and shallow subsurface geology off 

 the New England coast contain pertinent information on the study area, 

 e.g., studies of bottom sediments off New England by Schlee and Pratt (1970) 



