Globanomalina luxorensis, a Tethyan Biostratigraphic Marker of Latest Paleocene Global Events

The RASC method for ranking and scaling of biostratigraphic events

The RASC method for ranking and scaling of biostratigraphic events was developed by the authors and associates during the past 20 years. The purpose of ranking is to create an optimum sequence of events observed in different wells or sections subject to stratigraphic inconsistencies in the direction of the arrow of time. These inconsistencies, which result in crossovers of lines of correlation ...

Global change at the Paleocene-Eocene boundary: climatic and evolutionary consequences of tectonic events

Events of the Paleocene-Eocene boundary provide the clearest example to date of how a tectonic event may have global climatic consequences. Recent advances permit well-constrained stratigraphic determination of several events that occurred at that boundary, in chron C24R: a many-fold increase in sea-floor hydrothermal activity, a global warming, a reduction in the intensity of atmospheric circu...

Deep-sea environments on a warm earth: latest Paleocene-early Eocene

The Source and Fate of Massive Carbon Input During the Latest Paleocene Thermal Maximum.

Lithologic, faunal, seismic, and isotopic evidence from the Blake Nose (subtropical western North Atlantic) links a massive release of biogenic methane approximately 55.5 million years ago to a warming of deep-ocean and high-latitude surface waters, a large perturbation in the combined ocean-atmosphere carbon cycle (the largest of the past 90 million years), a mass extinction event in benthic f...

Geology: A blast of gas in the latest Paleocene: Simulating first-order effects of massive dissociation of oceanic methane hydrate

Carbonate and organic matter deposited during the latest Paleocene thermal maximum is characterized by a remarkable –2.5‰ excursion in δ13C that occurred over ~104 yr and returned to near initial values in an exponential pattern over ~2 × 105 yr. It has been hypothesized that this excursion signifies transfer of 1.4 to 2.8 × 1018 g of CH4 from oceanic hydrates to the combined ocean-atmosphere i...