ABSTRACT
After a lively dispute between the expedition leader Wyville Thomson and John Murray, it was ultimately determined that most of the biological remains in the sediments were the skeletons of organisms that live in the surface waters of the oceans (Wyville Thomson 1877). Depending pardy on their distribution in the surface waters, and pardy on their susceptibility to solution on the ocean floor, they gave rise to Globigerina ooze, the radiolarian and diatomaceous oozes, and, with almost total absence of fossil remains, the Red Clay of Murray's classification of deep-sea sediments.
