Many biominerals, including mollusk and echinoderm shells, avian eggshells, modern and fossil bacterial sediments, planktonic coccolithophores, and foraminifera, contain carbonates in the form of biogenic aragonite or calcite. Here we analyze biogenic and geologic aragonite using different kinds of surface- and bulk-sensitive X-ray absorption near-edge structure (XANES) spectroscopy at the carb...

Hopanoids are ubiquitous isoprenoid lipids found in modern biota, in recent sediments and in low-maturity sedimentary rocks. Because these lipids primarily are derived from bacteria, they are used as proxies to help decipher geobiological communities. To date, much of the information about sources of hopanoids has come from surveys of culture collections, an approach that does not address the v...

The Archean-Proterozoic transition marks a time of fundamental geologic, biologic, and atmospheric changes to the Earth system, including oxygenation atmosphere (termed Great Oxygenation Event; GOE), emergence continents above sea level. impacts GOE on Earth’s surface environment are imprinted geologic record, disappearance mass-independent fractionation sulfur isotopes (S-MIF). Temporally over...

This study aimed to identify the nature of variable groundwater salinity from standpoint whether natural or man-caused factors have a dominant impact on modern range Lower Jurassic sediments in Talinskoye oilfield West Siberia Russia. As now, values reservoir waters vary 3.7 15.3 g/dm3, with an average 8.9 g/dm3. Petroleum hydrocarbons are extracted at sediments. The volume overlying sediments’...

Production of Metallogenic-prognostic map (MPM) was preceded by the preparation of instructions that define three phases of work: preparation (with preparation of the Project), realization of field and laboratory research and data processing with production of different maps and, finally, production of the prognostic map with the accompanying instruction book. During the Project realization, th...

The ability of microorganisms to withstand long periods with extremely low energy input has gained increasing scientific attention in recent years. Starvation experiments in the laboratory have shown that a phylogenetically wide range of microorganisms evolve fitness-enhancing genetic traits within weeks of incubation under low-energy stress. Studies on natural environments that are cut off fro...

The Turkana Basin preserves a long and detailed record of biotic evolution, cultural development, and rift valley geology in its sedimentary strata. Before the formation of the modern basin, Cretaceous fluvial systems, Paleogene lakes, and Oligo-Miocene volcano-sedimentary sequences left fossil-bearing strata in the region. These deposits were in part related to an early system of rift basins t...

SEQUENCE is being designed to rapidly simulate the first-order evolution of continental margin morphology over long geologic time periods. To meet this requirement, the shelf and slope component models for SEQUENCE are 1-D, Eulerian, finite-difference models that produce 2-D, dip-line simulations of shelf and slope evolution. Both are relatively fast and encompass the physiographic provinces in...

The Amazonian rainforest is arguably the most species-rich terrestrial ecosystem in the world, yet the timing of the origin and evolutionary causes of this diversity are a matter of debate. We review the geologic and phylogenetic evidence from Amazonia and compare it with uplift records from the Andes. This uplift and its effect on regional climate fundamentally changed the Amazonian landscape ...