Linnert, C;
Robinson, SA;
Lees, JA;
Bown, PR;
Perez-Rodriguez, I;
Petrizzo, MR;
Falzoni, F;
... Russell, EE; + view all
(2014)
Evidence for global cooling in the Late Cretaceous.
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
, 5
, Article ARTN 4194. 10.1038/ncomms5194.
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Abstract
The Late Cretaceous ‘greenhouse’ world witnessed a transition from one of the warmest climates of the past 140 million years to cooler conditions, yet still without significant continental ice. Low-latitude sea surface temperature (SST) records are a vital piece of evidence required to unravel the cause of Late Cretaceous cooling, but high-quality data remain illusive. Here, using an organic geochemical palaeothermometer (TEX86), we present a record of SSTs for the Campanian–Maastrichtian interval (~83–66 Ma) from hemipelagic sediments deposited on the western North Atlantic shelf. Our record reveals that the North Atlantic at 35 °N was relatively warm in the earliest Campanian, with maximum SSTs of ~35 °C, but experienced significant cooling (~7 °C) after this to <~28 °C during the Maastrichtian. The overall stratigraphic trend is remarkably similar to records of high-latitude SSTs and bottom-water temperatures, suggesting that the cooling pattern was global rather than regional and, therefore, driven predominantly by declining atmospheric pCO2 levels.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Evidence for global cooling in the Late Cretaceous |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1038/ncomms5194 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms5194 |
| Additional information: | © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All Rights Reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ PubMed ID: 24937202 |
| Keywords: | Earth sciences; Climate science; Oceanography; |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Earth Sciences |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1435698 |
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