Miocene to Recent planktonic foraminifera biochronology and evolution in the Pacific Warm Pool (IODP Expedition 363)

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Microscopic fossils are abundant in marine sediments. Our research focuses on a group of organisms called planktonic foraminifera that build their shells out of calcium carbonate. When the planktonic foraminifera die they sink to the seafloor and can be examined from deep sea cores collected from the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP). Planktonic foraminifera provide one of the best fossil records, because of their abundance and diversity. We will use these fossils to determine when different species evolved and went extinct over the last 15 million years. Expedition 363 will recover sediments with high sedimentation rates and well preserved microfossils from the Western Pacific Warm Pool. We will be able to compare the timing of evolutionary and extinction events from the western Pacific to previous record from elsewhere (such as the Atlantic Ocean). This will allow us to test whether the timing of extinction events is synchronous or diachronous between different ocean basins.