Did Late Cretaceous cooling trigger the Campanian–Maastrichtian Boundary Event?

Did Late Cretaceous cooling trigger the Campanian–Maastrichtian Boundary Event?

The Campanian–Maastrichtian (83–66 Ma) was a period of global climate cooling, featuring significant negative carbon-isotope (δ13C) anomalies, such as the Late Campanian Event (LCE) and the Campanian–Maastrichtian Boundary Event (CMBE). A variety of factors, including changes in temperature, oceanic circulation and gateway opening, have been invoked to explain these δ13C perturbations, but no p...

Evidence for global cooling in the Late Cretaceous

The Late Cretaceous 'greenhouse' world witnessed a transition from one of the warmest climates of the past 140 million years to cooler conditions, yet still without significant continental ice. Low-latitude sea surface temperature (SST) records are a vital piece of evidence required to unravel the cause of Late Cretaceous cooling, but high-quality data remain illusive. Here, using an organic ge...

Did the September 2010 (Darfield) earthquake trigger the February 2011 (Christchurch) event?

We have investigated the possible cause-and-effect relationship due to stress transfer between two earthquakes that occurred near Christchurch, New Zealand, in September 2010 and in February 2011. The Mw 7.1 Darfield (Canterbury) event took place along a previously unrecognized fault. The Mw 6.3 Christchurch earthquake, generated by a thrust fault, occurred approximately five months later, 6 km...

Food supply to the seafloor in the Pacific Ocean after the Cretaceous/Paleogene boundary event

Late Maastrichtian pterosaurs from North Africa and mass extinction of Pterosauria at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary

Pterosaurs were the first vertebrates to evolve powered flight and the largest animals to ever take wing. The pterosaurs persisted for over 150 million years before disappearing at the end of the Cretaceous, but the patterns of and processes driving their extinction remain unclear. Only a single family, Azhdarchidae, is definitively known from the late Maastrichtian, suggesting a gradual declin...