U.S.-Germany Cooperative Research: Paleoecologic Control of the Evolution of Marine Phytoplankton (coccoliths) in the Cretaceous Greenhouse World

University Of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln NE

Investigators

Abstract

9910025 Watkins This award supports David Watkins, a graduate student, and an undergraduate student from the University of Nebraska in a collaboration with Joerg Mutterlose of the Department of Geology at the University of Bochum, Germany. The collaboration will focus on several aspects of the response of Cretaceous marine phytoplankton (coccoliths) to the significant climatic changes that occurred in the Cretaceous period (65-144 million years ago). They will examine responses on both a short-term (less than 100,000 years) and long-term (greater than 1,000,000 years) time frame. For the short-term time frame, they will examine calcareous nannoplankton responses to orbitally-forced climatic shifts at selected places and times. For the long-term time frame, they will examine the evolution of coccoliths during and following the mid-Cretaceous greenhouse interval to assess their response to global cooling. The conditions of the Cretaceous period, with its interval of global greenhouse conditions, may serve as a model for the changes our present-day production of excess carbon dioxide might cause.