Underwater geoarchaeological research in Apalachee Bay, in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico off northwest Florida, has enabled the reconstruction of portions of the karstcontrolled paleodrainage system, the discovery of several inundated prehistoric archaeological sites, and the exposure of sediments accumulated during the drowning of the continental shelf. Diagnostic artifacts discovered at the...

[1] We present the first high-resolution record of iceberg calving on the continental slope of Vancouver Island, British Columbia (MD02-2496, 48 58N, 127 02W, 1243 m water depth), through the last glacial from the Cordilleran Ice Sheet (CIS). These previously unknown ice-rafted debris (IRD) events representing significant retreat of the western margin of the CIS out of marine waters show little...

Iron formations are chemical archives of Precambrian seawater chemistry. Given that they accumulated onto the seafloor for over two billion years of Earth’s history, temporal changes in their composition offer a unique glimpse into the environmental changes that took place during that time interval. Perhaps one of the most significant events was the transition from an anoxic planet to one where...

Genomic analysis has placed the origins of two human-pathogenic fungi, the Cryptococcus gattii species complex and the Cryptococcus neoformans species complex, in South America and Africa, respectively. Molecular clock calculations suggest that the two species separated ~80 to 100 million years ago. This time closely approximates the breakup of the supercontinent Pangea, which gave rise to Sout...

The United Nations Convention for the Law of the Sea, adopted in 1982, is the legal framework that sets out the rights and duties of States in the use and exploitation of the oceans. Article 76 through to article 85 in Part VI of the Convention is dedicated to provisions related to the continental shelf such as the determination and delineation of the outer limits of the extended continental sh...

Gas hydrates stored on continental shelves are susceptible to dissociation triggered by environmental changes. Knowledge of the timescales of gas hydrate dissociation and subsequent methane release are critical in understanding the impact of marine gas hydrates on the ocean-atmosphere system. Here we report a methane efflux chronology from five sites, at depths of 220-400 m, in the southwest Ba...