Recent  

The Red Sea hosts exceptionally diverse marine environments despite elevated salinities. Distributions of benthic foraminifers were used to assess the ecological status of coral reef environments in the Ras Mohamed Nature Reserve, south Sinai. Sediment samples collected in mangrove, shallow-lagoon, and coral reef habitats yielded 95 foraminiferal species. Six species, five hosting algal symbionts, made up ~70 % of the specimens examined, indicating water quality suitable for reef accretion.

Warmer waters in the Southern Ocean have led to the loss of Antarctic ice during past interglacial times. The shells of foraminifera are preserved in Ross Sea sediment, which is collected in cores. Benthic species from Site U1523 inform us about changing water masses and current activity, including incursions of Circumpolar Deep Water. Warm water planktic species were found in sediment samples from four intervals within 3.72–1.82 million years ago, indicating warmer than present conditions.

In 1977-79, the Ross Ice Shelf Project recovered ocean sediments ~ 450 km south of the present-day ice shelf calving front. Within these sediments are microfossils, which are used to recreate the history of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) and address how the ice sheet responded to past times of extreme warmth. The microfossils reveal the WAIS collapsed multiple times in the past 17 million years. These results inform predictions of future WAIS response to rising global temperatures.

The sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia has a dynamic glacial history and is sensitive to climate change. Using benthic foraminifera and various geochemical proxies, we reconstruct inner–middle shelf productivity and infer glacial evolution since the late deglacial, identifying new mid–late-Holocene glacial readvances. Fursenkoina fusiformis acts as a good proxy for productivity.

Diatoms are dust-sized algae commonly found in the upper 100 m of the Southern Ocean. In this paper, we describe three new species found in sediments west of the Ross Sea, East Antarctica, aged about 3--2 Ma: Fragilariopsis clava, Fragilariopsis armandae, and Rouxia raggattensis. These species may be useful for determining the age of sediments and past environmental conditions at other locations around the Southern Ocean.

We report on the rediscovery of Globigerina bollii, a planktonic foraminifer described by Cita and Premoli Silva (1960) in the Mediterranean Basin. We redescribe G. bollii as a valid species belonging to the genus Globoturborotalita. We report and summarise all the recordings of the taxon in the scientific literature. Then we discuss how the taxon might be a palaeogeographical indicator of the intermittent gateways between the Mediterranean Sea, Paratethys, and Indian Ocean.

In this study, we propose an age framework for an interval of 4.8–3.1 million years ago, using fossil records of marine plankton such as diatoms and radiolarians derived from a sediment core collected in the Southern Ocean. Specifically, a total of 19 bioevents (i.e., extinction/appearance events of selected age marker species) were detected, and their precise ages were calculated. The updated biostratigraphy will contribute to future paleoceanographic work in the Southern Ocean.

We studied ostracod assemblages from an 1800-year sediment record from a Jamaican lake to evaluate causes of change and to test a previous interpretation from a Late Pleistocene record, which suggested that lake-level change was the main control. We found that, rather than being a simple response to changing lake level, ostracod assemblage changes are a complex response to a range of factors. Our findings may have relevance to the interpretation of ostracod assemblages in other similar lakes.

In this study, we describe one new genus and three new species of radiolarians from Upper Cretaceous strata of the northern mainland coast of Arctic Canada. This is one of the few Cretaceous radiolarian assemblages recovered from the interior of North America and high northern latitudes and serves as a foundation for future Cretaceous radiolarian research in Arctic regions. Taxonomic descriptions were based on external and internal features observed using a scanning electron microscope.

We studied sediment samples containing marine plankton under the polarized microscope from the Sabiñánigo sandstone formation, a geological formation located in the Jaca Basin in Spain. The main result of this work was a more precise age for the formation, the Bartonian age, in the Middle Eocene period. In addition, we obtained information on the temperature of the ocean water in which the plankton lived, resulting in the surface ocean waters in this area being warm and poor in nutrients.