Thwaites Glacier's retreat is driven by warm ocean water melting its ice shelf. Seafloor-dwelling marine protists, benthic foraminifera, reflect their environment. Here, ice margins, oceanography, and sea ice cover control live foraminiferal populations. Including dead foraminifera in the analyses shows the calcareous test preservation's role in the assemblage make-up. Understanding these modern communities helps interpret past glacial retreat controls through foraminifera in sediment records.

Deep Sea Drilling Project Site 407, near Iceland, offers a valuable 25-million-year record of planktonic foraminifera evolution from the Late Cenozoic. Species counts and ranges, assemblage changes, and biostratigraphic zones were identified. Key findings include the shifts in species dominance and diversity. Challenges include sediment gaps and missing biozone markers. We aim to enhance the Neogene–Quaternary Middle Atlas and improve the North Atlantic palaeoceanography and biostratigraphy.

We revisited a 19th-century taxonomic study on Hong Kong marine ostracods (the first study on Chinese marine ostracods) to compare it with a 21st-century survey. We found substantial differences in species, likely related to differences in pollution and climate between the 19th and 21st centuries. This discovery highlights the importance of historical ecology. Early natural historians documented "natural baseline" ecosystems before the substantial human presence with industrialization.

The timing and impact of onset of Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) on climate and Antarctic ice are unclear. We reconstruct late Eocene to Miocene southern Atlantic surface ocean environment using microfossil remains of dinoflagellates (dinocysts). Our dinocyst records shows the breakdown of subpolar gyres in the late Oligocene and the transition into a modern-like oceanographic regime with ACC flow, established frontal systems, Antarctic proximal cooling, and sea ice by the late Miocene.