The North Tabriz Fault is seismologically an active fault with current right lateral strike-slip movements. Restricted mafic to intermediate Late Cretaceous igneous rocks are exposed along the North Tabriz Fault. Whole rock samples and clinopyroxene phenocrysts geochemistry were studied in order to characterize the petrogenesis of these mafic rocks and their possible relation to an oceanic crus...

As a contribution to the OCEANOBS99 objectives, we give a brief description of the present knowledge of the South Atlantic and identify some key processes and areas which need to be monitored in order to understand the role of that part of the ocean in the global climate. Included are suggestions of strategies for a first approximation towards an ocean climate monitoring system in the South Atl...

This issue of Variations presents four articles highlighting modeling research presented at the CLIVAR-sponsored workshop on Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere-Land Processes in the Atlantic held in Miami, March 23-25, 2011. The workshop reviewed model biases in simulating the Atlantic (notably ocean circulation, sea surface temperatures, surface winds, clouds, and precipitation) and identified hypothese...

The occurrence of tiger shark Galeocerdo cuvier in the Atlantic Ocean was assessed using at-sea observer data from multiple pelagic longline fisheries. Geographic positions of 2764 G. cuvier recorded between 1992 and 2013 and covering a wide area of the Atlantic Ocean were compared with the currently accepted distribution ranges of the species. Most records fell outside those ranges in both the...

Evidence is presented that North Atlantic climate change since 1950 is linked to a progressive warming of tropical sea surface temperatures, especially over the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The ocean changes alter the pattern and magnitude of tropical rainfall and atmospheric heating, the atmospheric response to which includes the spatial structure of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). The slo...

Patterns of sea surface temperature (SST) variability on interannual and longer timescales result from a combination of atmospheric and oceanic processes. These SST anomaly patterns may be due to intrinsic modes of atmospheric circulation variability that imprint themselves upon the SST field mainly via surface energy fluxes. Examples include SST fluctuations in the Southern Ocean associated wi...

Coupled radiocarbon and thorium-230 dates from benthic coral species reveal that the ventilation rate of the North Atlantic upper deep water varied greatly during the last deglaciation. Radiocarbon ages in several corals of the same age, 15.41 +/- 0.17 thousand years, and nearly the same depth, 1800 meters, in the western North Atlantic Ocean increased by as much as 670 years during the 30- to ...