During austral summer 1994/95, the National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics - OGS, on board the research vessel OGS-Explora, conducted marine geological and geophysical surveys along the Antarctic Peninsula.

The SERDRAKE (SEismicResearch in DRAKE passage) programme was a seismic exploration cruise across the Central Scotia Sea, from the South Orkney Islands to the Falkland Plateau; data were collected between longitude 42 and 47 degrees West, and latitude 51 and 60 degrees South.

During this programme 1052 km of 30-fold multichannel seismic reflection (MCS) data, 14 second records, 4 ms sample rate, were recorded on a SERCEL SN 358 DMX system. The source consisted of an airgun array with a total volume of 80 litres fired every 50 meters into a 3000 m cable consisting of 120 hydrophone groups towed at an average depth of 12 m. A GPS + TRANSIT satellite receiver system was used for navigation.

The Chief Scientist on this programme was: Michele Pipan of the Dipartimento di Scienze Geologiche Ambientali e Marine of the Università di Trieste, via Weiss n.2, 34127 Trieste, Italy.

Processing of the data generally followed a conventional sequence: Reformat, Quality control, Amplitude recovery, Deconvolution, Velocity analysis, NMO corrections, Mute, Stack, Mixing, Filter, and Dynamic trace equalisation.