Early Pleistocene glacial cycles and the integrated summer insolation forcing

Long-term variations in Northern Hemisphere summer insolation are generally thought to control glaciation. But the intensity of summer insolation is primarily controlled by 20,000-year cycles in the precession of the equinoxes, whereas early Pleistocene glacial cycles occur at 40,000-year intervals, matching the period of changes in Earth's obliquity. The resolution of this 40,000-year problem is that glaciers are sensitive to insolation integrated over the duration of the summer. The integrated summer insolation is primarily controlled by obliquity and not precession because, by Kepler's second law, the duration of the summer is inversely proportional to Earth's distance from the Sun.     

Jurassic sandstone from the tropical atlantic

The oldest sediment yet sampled from the abyssal margins of South America, late Jurassic (or possibly very early Cretaceous) shallow-water, coarse-grained, calcareous sandstone containing palynomorphs and mollusk prisms, was recovered from a depth of 4400 meters on the seaward scarp of the Demerara Plateau. The sandstone was deposited in a shallow, late Jurassic epicontinental sea after the initial stages of rifting when the newly created Atlantic began to founder.     

The age of parana flood volcanism, rifting of gondwanaland, and the jurassic-cretaceous boundary

The Paraná-Etendeka flood volcanic event produced approximately 1.5 x 10(6) cubic kilometers of volcanic rocks, ranging from basalts to rhyolites, before the separation of South America and Africa during the Cretaceous period. New (40)Ar/(39)Ar data combined with earlier paleomagnetic results indicate that Paraná flood volcanism in southern Brazil began at 133 +/- 1 million years ago and lasted less than 1 million years. The implied mean eruption rate on the order of 1.5 cubic kilometers per year is consistent with a mantle plume origin for the event and is comparable to eruption rates determined for other well-documented continental flood volcanic events. Paraná flood volcanism occurred before the initiation of sea floor spreading in the South Atlantic and was probably precipitated by uplift and weakening of the lithosphere by the Tristan da Cunha plume. The Parana event postdates most current estimates for the age of the faunal mass extinction associated with the Jurassic-Cretaceous boundary.     

Aluminum in seawater: control by inorganic processes

The distribution of dissolved aluminum in open ocean waters is probably controlled by the solution of aluminum from atmospherically derived particles and bottom sediments balanced against scavenging by siliceous shells of dead organisms. Variations in the aluminum concentration within vertical hydrographic profiles are small as compared to those for other trace metals. Aluminum concentrations in the Atlantic and Pacific are inversely related to the silica contents of these oceans.     

European cretaceous flints on the coast of north america

Flint pebbles and nodules from the Upper Cretaceous chalks of Europe occur offshore and at many seaports along the Atlantic coast of North America, where they were brought as ship's ballast. Isolated pieces imported from Europe as gunflints also are present.     

Forcing of Atlantic Equatorial and Subpolar Millennial Cycles by Precession

Abundance cycles of the marine alga Florisphaera profunda centered on a period of 7600 carbon-14 years (8400 calendar years) are present in high-resolution records from the equatorial Atlantic spanning 0 to 45,000 years ago. These cycles correlate with Heinrich events 1 through 5, which document rapid changes in continental ice melting around the subpolar North Atlantic. These variations in F. profunda are a direct response to modulation in zonal wind-driven divergence produced by a precessional component of orbital variation during a time of reduced eccentricity modulation.     

Indian-atlantic transfer of thermocline water at the agulhas retroflection

During November and December 1983, two anticyclonic eddies were observed west of the Agulhas Retroflection, apparently spawned at the retroflection. The western eddy, centered 300 kilometers southwest of Cape Town, has a winter cooled core encircled by warm Indian Ocean water. Between Cape Town and the "Cape Town Eddy" is a net geostrophic transport of Indian Ocean thermocline water (14 x 10(6) cubic meters per second) into the South Atlantic Ocean. This circulation configuration, similar to that observed by earlier researchers, suggests that Indian-Atlantic thermocline exchange is a common occurrence. Such a warmwater link between the Atlantic and Indian oceans would strongly influence global climate patterns. The Indian Ocean water is warmer than the adjacent South Atlantic water and thus represents a heat input of 2.3 x 10(13) to 47 x 10(13) watts into the Atlantic. The large uncertainty arises from the unknown partition between two possible routes for the return flow from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean: cooler South Atlantic thermocline water or much colder North Atlantic Deep Water. In either case, interocean mass and heat exchange of thermocline water at the Agulhas Retroflection is a distinct likelihood.     

Investigation of horizon Beta

Horizon beta is a subbottom reflector in the North Atlantic deep ocean sediments that extends over a large portion of the North America basin. Cores from an outcrop of beta contained shallow-water Aptian-Albian sediments and deep-water Cenomanian sediments. A core near an outcrop of a deeper horizon, horizon B, contained shallow-water Lower Cretaceous (Barremian-Hauterivian) sediments. These cores can be interpreted to support extensive subsidence of the eastern portion of the basin in early Cretaceous time. It is equally likely that the shallow-water deposits are a result of sediments slumping into an already deep basin. A reconciliation of these interpretations depends upon the JOIDES project.     

Iceberg discharges into the north atlantic on millennial time scales during the last glaciation

High-resolution studies of North Atlantic deep sea cores demonstrate that prominent increases in iceberg calving recurred at intervals of 2000 to 3000 years, much more frequently than the 7000-to 10,000-year pacing of massive ice discharges associated with Heinrich events. The calving cycles correlate with warm-cold oscillations, called Dansgaard-Oeschger events, in Greenland ice cores. Each cycle records synchronous discharges of ice from different sources, and the cycles are decoupled from sea-surface temperatures. These findings point to a mechanism operating within the atmosphere that caused rapid oscillations in air temperatures above Greenland and in calving from more than one ice sheet.     

Paleocirculation of the deep north atlantic: 150,000-year record of benthic foraminifera and oxygen-18

Benthic foraminiferal faunas in a piston core from 3331 meters at 44 degrees N on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge show striking variations in the relative abundance of species. Uvigerina peregrina, which is broadly distributed today in the South Atlantic and in the Pacific in water that has been long isolated from the surface, is absent in the North and Equatorial Atlantic at depths occupied by highly oxygenated North Atlantic deep water. This species dominated the fauna at this site for much of the past 150,000 years. It is suggested that North Atlantic deepwater production was much reduced or eliminated at times of Uvigerina peregrina abundance, as a result of cooling and stratification of the Norwegian Sea surface, coincident with the times of the southward migration of the polar front in the North Atlantic.     

Early cretaceous dinosaurs from the sahara

A major question in Mesozoic biogeography is how the land-based dinosaurian radiation responded to fragmentation of Pangaea. A rich fossil record has been uncovered on northern continents that spans the Cretaceous, when continental isolation reached its peak. In contrast, dinosaur remains on southern continents are scarce. The discovery of dinosaurian skeletons from Lower Cretaceous beds in the southern Sahara shows that several lineages of tetanuran theropods and broad-toothed sauropods had a cosmopolitan distribution across Pangaea before the onset of continental fragmentation. The distinct dinosaurian faunas of Africa, South America, and Asiamerica arose during the Cretaceous by differential survival of once widespread lineages on land masses that were becoming increasingly isolated from one another.     

Precessional forcing of nutricline dynamics in the equatorial atlantic

Climate control of nutricline depth in the equatorial Atlantic can be monitored by variations in the abundance of the phytoplankton species Florisphaera profunda. A conceptual model, based on in situ evidence, associates high abundances of F. profunda with a deep nutricline and low abundances with a shallow nutricline. A 200,000-year record of F. profunda relative abundances, obtained from a deep-sea core sited beneath the region of maximum equatorial divergence at 10 degrees W, has 52 percent of its variance centered on the 23,000-year precessional band. Cross-spectral analysis between the signals of F. profunda and sea-surface temperature, independently derived from zooplankton species, shows their 23,000-year cycles to be coherent and nearly in phase. Abundance minima of F. profunda coincide with times of December perihelion, whereas abundance maxima coincide with June perihelion. These relations indicate that nutricline dynamics in the divergence region of the equatorial Atlantic are controlled by variations in the tropical easterlies, forced by the precessional component of orbital insolation, on time scales greater than 10,000 years.     

Breakup of pangaea and isolation of relict mammals in australia, South america, and madagascar

The composition of aboriginal land mammal faunas in Australia and New Guinea (prototherians and metatherians), South America (metatherians and eutherians) and Madagascar (eutherians only) is reconsidered in light of continental drift reconstructions of Mesozoic-Tertiary world paleogeography It is proposed that these three faunas represent successively detached samples of the evolving world mammal fauna as it existed when each of these land masses became faunally isolated from the rest of the world as a result of the progressive fragmentation of Pangaea. Isolation of aboriginal prototherians and metatherians in Australia and New Guinea may date from the Upper JurassicLower Cretaceous; isolation of aboriginal metatherians and eutherians in South America may date from the Middle Cretaceous-Upper Cretaceous; isolation of aboriginal eutherians in Madagascar may date from the Paleocene-Eocene.     

Radium-226 and radon-222: concentration in atlantic and pacific oceans

Measurements of radon-222 in seawater suggest the following. The radium-226 content of surface water in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans is uniformly close to about 4 x 10(-14) gram per liter. The deep Pacific has a concentration of radium-226 that is four times higher and the deep Atlantic a concentration twice as high as that of the surface. These distribution profiles can be explained by the same particle-settling rate for radium-226 from surface to depth for the two oceans and by a threefold longer residence time of water in the deep Pacific than in the deep Atlantic. The vertical distribution of the deficiency of radon-222 in the surface water of the northwest Pacific Ocean suggests a coefficient of vertical eddy diffusion as high as 120 square centimeters per second and a gas-exchange rate for carbon dioxide in surface water between 14 and 60 moles per square meter per year. Vertical profiles of the excess of radon-222 in near-bottom water of the South Atlantic give coefficients of vertical eddy diffusion ranging from 1.5 to more than 50 square centimeters per second.     

Catalepsy in two common marine animals

Two common marine animals of the South Atlantic and Gulf coasts, Sicyonia brevirostris, a penaeid shrimp, and Opsanus beta, a toadfish, may be induced to go into cataleptic states in the laboratory when they are threatened or molested. The behaviors of these two animals as they go into catalepsy are described. There is considerable paling in the fish but none in the shrimp.     

Orbitolina, a cretaceous larger foraminifer, from flemish cap: paleoceanographic implications

The Tethyan larger foraminiferal genus Orbitolina has been found in the easternmost part of the western North Atlantic continental shelf at 46 degrees 30'N. All other known occurrences of the genus in North America are south of 33 degrees N. The species is Orbitolina conoidea Gras; its abundance in a grainsupported limestone indicates a tropical neritic environment and precludes the influence of Arctic waters in the Flemish Cap region in Early or Middle Cretaceous times.     

Death and Transfiguration of a Triple Junction in the South Atlantic

Three major lithospheric plates-Antarctic, South American, and African-meet in the South Atlantic near Bouvet Island where the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (MAR), the Southwest Indian Ridge (SWIR), and the American Antarctic Ridge converge toward a fast evolving triple junction. A major magmatic pulse has recently built a new, swollen segment of the SWIR (Spiess Ridge) that is propagating toward the MAR at a rate of 4 to 5 centimeters per year, disrupting a former ridge-ridge-ridge (RRR) triple junction. A new triple junction will be established about 70 kilometers to the north when the propagating SWIR/Spiess segment will impact with the MAR, probably within the next 1 million years. The American Antarctic Ridge will take advantage of the MAR/SWIR duel by capturing an approximately 70-kilometer stretch of MAR, whereas the Antarctic plate will increase its size.     

Predatory dinosaur remains from madagascar: implications for the cretaceous biogeography of gondwana

Recent discoveries of fossil vertebrates from the Late Cretaceous of Madagascar include several specimens of a large theropod dinosaur. One specimen includes a nearly complete and exquisitely preserved skull with thickened pneumatic nasals, a median frontal horn, and a dorsal projection on the parietals. The new materials are assigned to the enigmatic theropod group Abelisauridae on the basis of a number of unique features. Fossil remains attributable to abelisaurids are restricted to three Gondwanan landmasses: South America, Madagascar, and the Indian subcontinent. This distribution is consistent with a revised paleogeographic reconstruction that posits prolonged links between these landmasses (via Antarctica), perhaps until late in the Late Cretaceous.     

PALEOCLIMATE: The Amazon Reveals Its Secrets--Partly

The role of the tropics in global climate change during glacial cycles is hotly debated in paleoclimate cycles today. Records from South America have not provided a clear picture of tropical climate change. In his Perspective, Betancourt highlights the study by Maslin and Burns, who have deduced the outflow of the Amazon over the past 14,000 years. This may serve as a proxy that integrates hydrology over the entire South American tropics, although the record must be interpreted cautiously because factors other than rainfall may contribute to the variability in outflow.     

Widespread iron limitation of phytoplankton in the south pacific ocean

Diel fluorescence patterns were discovered in phytoplankton sampled over 7000 kilometers of the South Pacific Ocean that appear indicative of iron-limiting growth conditions. These patterns were rapidly lost after in situ iron enrichment and were not observed during a 15,000-kilometer transect in the Atlantic Ocean where iron concentrations are relatively high. Laboratory studies of marine Synechococcus sp. indicated that the patterns in the South Pacific are a unique manifestation of iron limitation on the fluorescence signature of state transitions. Results suggest that primary productivity is iron limited not only throughout the equatorial Pacific but also over much of the vast South Pacific gyre.