The mid-Cretaceous North Atlantic nutrient trap: Black shales and OAEs

Radiolarian Age Constraints of Mid-Cretaceous Black Shales in Northern Tunisia

The origin of Cretaceous black shales: a change in the surface ocean ecosystem and its triggers

Black shale is dark-colored, organic-rich sediment, and there have been many episodes of black shale deposition over the history of the Earth. Black shales are source rocks for petroleum and natural gas, and thus are both geologically and economically important. Here, we review our recent progress in understanding of the surface ocean ecosystem during periods of carbonaceous sediment deposition...

Mid‐2000s North Atlantic shift: Heat budget and circulation changes

Prior to the 2000s, the North Atlantic was the basin showing the greatest warming. However, since the mid-2000s during the so-called global warming hiatus, large amounts of heat were transferred in this basin from upper to deeper levels while the dominance in terms of atmospheric heat capture moved into the Indo-Pacific. Here we show that a large transformation of modal waters in the eastern No...

Expert elicitation of seasonal abundance of North Atlantic right whales Eubalaena glacialis in the mid-Atlantic

North Atlantic right whales Eubalaena glacialis are among the most endangered of the large whales. Although protected since 1935, their abundance has remained low. Right whales occupy the Atlantic Ocean from southern Greenland and the Gulf of St. Lawrence south to Florida. The highly industrialized mid-Atlantic region is part of the right whales’ migratory corridor, and gaps in knowledge of the...

“OAE 3” – regional Atlantic organic carbon burial during the Coniacian–Santonian

The Coniacian–Santonian time interval is the inferred time of oceanic anoxic event 3 (OAE 3), the last of the Cretaceous OAEs. A detailed look on the temporal and spatial distribution of organic-rich deposits attributed to OAE 3 suggests that black shale occurrences are restricted to the equatorial to mid-latitudinal Atlantic and adjacent basins, shelves and epicontinental seas like parts of th...