Circum-Arctic Sediment PROvenance Database (CASPROD): A database of mineralogy and geochemistry for the Circum-Arctic surface sediments

Abstract. Arctic amplification is fundamentally reshaping the cryosphere, leading to accelerated sea-ice retreat, permafrost thaw, and intensified riverine discharge. These shifts collectively modify sediment source-to-sink dynamic processes in the Arctic Ocean. While surface sediments in this semi-enclosed basin integrate complex signals from diverse Eurasian and North American source regions, disentangling these provenance signatures requires a robust, multi-proxy framework that has historically been hampered by fragmented, heterogeneous datasets. Here, we present CASPROD (Circum-Arctic Sediment PROvenance Database), a standardized and high-resolution mineralogical and geochemical synthesis of Arctic surface sediments. The dataset integrates multi-proxy records from a broad spatial network, comprising 4308 sampling stations, including bulk sediment Sr-Nd isotopes (n=175 stations), detrital zircon U-Pb ages (n=4671 grains from 21 key stations), clay mineral assemblages (n=1647 stations), and detrital mineral proportions (n=2465 stations). These integrated proxies provide cross-validated sediment provenance constraints: Sr-Nd isotopes discriminate between ancient cratonic shields and juvenile orogenic belts; detrital zircon geochronology yields diagnostic age spectra distinguishing Eurasian versus North American crustal affinities; and clay and detrital mineralogy reflects different circum-Arctic sediment provenances, lithologies and transport processes. By synthesizing these diverse datasets, CASPROD delineates robust pan-Arctic spatial provenance domains and transport pathways. This database thus provides a critical benchmark for reconstructing palaeoceanographic, glacial, and sedimentary dynamics over geological timescales. CASPROD is freely available online (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.31926927; Yao et al., 2026) in multiple machine-readable formats (e.g., tabular tables, GIS shapefiles, and GEOTIFF).